0

My company are currently in the process of upgrading their existing ECC6 system to the latest S/4HANA version, and as a result, we'll be looking at developing bespoke Fiori apps once the upgrade is completed.

I read through a number of Fiori development resources online and it appears that a myriad of front-end frameworks can be used; we are not limited to SAPUI5.

Notably, there are several projects which utilise popular front-end development frameworks such as React - which are open sourced and come from SAP directly.

https://github.com/SAP/fundamental-react

https://github.com/SAP/ui5-webcomponents

Having also been to a number of SAP user group meetups, I've had first hand experience at creating OData services which can then be exposed and consumed by the front end. The OData is essentially 'front-end-agnostic' at this point.

I have extensive experience of developing front-end applications with React and Angular 2+ which makes me a little biased but, when we have our system upgrade, will it be best practice to develop using SAPUI5? Are we limited to this? Or is it perfectly fine to use React? Are there any examples of companies/ developers using React with SAP? Does anyone have any experience with this? I'd love some feedback so we can move forward with our strategy.

Please also note that we will be using an on-premise version, with no access to the Web IDE or the Cloud Platform.

To me, it's a no brainer - I would suggest to use React as it's a matured and well tested solution which performs very well and can be scaled with ease, with the addition of easy native support via React-Native should we wish to implement bespoke mobile solutions. Not only that, hiring new developers would be fairly easy and more cost effective as React is more commonly used than SAPUI5 in the web development scene.

Our customers will be the business. To them, the applications will look exactly the same if developed using styled React components vs SAPUI5. The only difference (personally) is that it will be a lot easier to develop via React. Are there any implications of using one over the other?

I know that there are various tools that have been developed in the past for frameworks such as React, which make development very easy. I just don't know of anything that compares for SAPUI5.

Modern frameworks like React also support and follow the latest ECMAScript standards & features - which benefits developers, allowing them to write concise and performant code. State management can be handled with ease, with the aid of Redux and the 'out-of-the-box' React Hooks.

Sandra Rossi
  • 11,934
  • 5
  • 22
  • 48
nopassport1
  • 1,821
  • 1
  • 25
  • 53

2 Answers2

3

You don`t want to use anything else then UI5 for a SAP system.

  • Launchpad support, incl. cross app navigation
  • SAP support (you pay for this already)
  • Message handling
  • I believe there is no great frontend oData implementation, except ui5 ones.
  • Out of the box accessibility features and default translations for a lot of areas(FI, PM etc.)
  • A large set of enterprise approved ui elements
  • v2->v4 adapter, you can write now apps for a v2 oData service using the v4 and change once the backend is ready for v4

--

Further more, modern development looks most probably like this:

  • Frontend development is done while using ui5-tooling
  • You can use ECMAScript version as needed or include any other tooling
  • Cloud (nodejs stack) Backend is most probably moving towards CAP
  • S/4 HANA (ABAP stack) has now a new development model called RAP
  • S/4 HANA comes with SAP HANA XSA what is basically a cloud foundry environment. Hence, you can deploy almost anything.

All this parts are surprisingly modern and follow the "Zero Lock-In" approach; which means, you could change any of them and still use the rest... but why the struggle. All of this works perfectly together for enterprise use cases.

Benedikt Kromer
  • 711
  • 6
  • 22
0

I can add some extra things:

  • SAP oData is extended format then odata.org, so it is hard to use it with other frameworks. There is no documentation about it (I can't find it).
  • Probably your Hana license will be bundled with S/4. So you cannot expose oData from XSA without extra license (Generally DB license limited only own SAP applications such as NW).
  • Also you can need extra license for consuming SAP Gateway oData service with other frameworks.

Generally SAP license models are very complicated and sales man generally says "Everything included to this license" without unwritten.

mkysoft
  • 5,392
  • 1
  • 21
  • 30
  • `There is no documentation about it (I can't find it` [here is](https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/#/topic/5de13cf4dd1f4a3480f7e2eaaee3f5b8.html) quite good documentation of SAP OData model for OData v2 and v4 – Suncatcher Nov 07 '19 at 00:09
  • @Suncatcher thanks for sharing. These documents created from ui5 client side perspective. You cannot develop oData client from scratch for other frameworks with these. I try to talking about like [this document](https://www.odata.org/getting-started/basic-tutorial/) about oData. – mkysoft Nov 07 '19 at 08:04
  • Everywhere throughout this help SAP refers and give links [to official specification](http://docs.oasis-open.org/odata/odata/v4.0/odata-v4.0-part1-protocol.html). Where did you read about significant differences between them? Is it a reliable source? please share – Suncatcher Nov 08 '19 at 00:46
  • @Suncatcher you can check [sample metadata](https://github.com/SAP/openui5/blob/master/src/sap.ui.documentation/test/sap/ui/documentation/sdk/mockserver/metadata.xml) shared by OpenUI5. You can see used additional attributes under sap namespace for 2.0 version. I don't write there are "significant differences", I only said SAP used extended format. – mkysoft Nov 08 '19 at 08:13