First impressions on OpenUI5

Working at Netlife has its perks even if we take away the awesome team and the cool projects. We are always reminded to push ourselves beyond our limits and learn new ideas and technologies.Last week I had the time to try out the newest SAP venture into modern web development: OpenUI5. Accompanied by our intern Dávid Tóth, we dove into the mysterious world of this MVP HTML5 framework.

 

Productivity++

The first thing that we noticed is the 'P' is very different from the 'C' or 'VM' that we had worked with in other frameworks. The main strength that I see in this framework, that the presentation is completely cut off from the model, we just need to create pseudo-HTML elements in Javascript and the built-in theming take care of the rest. Despite the hard to understand and deficient documentation, we could create a functional mobile and desktop-friendly contact list application in just two hours!

The result:

Such a beautiful app from so few lines!
To take an excerpt from the source, this is all we need to create the table object:

var oTable = new sap.ui.table.Table( "ID_BusinessPartnerTable", { visibleRowCount : 20 }); 

The content is brought in via an oData service in an elegant way, and again, we don't need to think about the presentation of the table, just put the data to the right place.

Integration with other tools

I use Yeoman extensively in my day-to-day work and I was pleased to find a good generator for this newcomer framework.
Because of this, Grunt and Bower integrate with the framework flawlessly and there is no overhead to manage dependencies.

Conclusion

All-in-all, we will continue to play with this new way of approaching enterprise problems, even if it has some issues on the support side of things. The next step is to integrate this with our test SAP server and create a full-fledged application!