FIORI introduction and helpful links to get you started on the road to creating SAPUI5 apps
As many people will be aware SAP is changing it's user experience and design philosophy for the better. Fiori along with the
SAPUI5 development platform is the future, not only for mobile but for the overall user interface to SAP.
Or in SAP's words "deliver consumer-grade user experience to our most broadly and frequently used business transactions".
Meaning flowers in Italian, Fiori provides a consistent, responsive user experience (UX) that will allow people
to use SAP across various devices. Each app will follow this same philosophy and provide a simple intuitive
interface that users will want to use and will help them achieve their goals.
Why is SAP Fiori Different?
There have been many new web development technologies like ITS, BSP and ABAP WDP which provided good options for
developing web applications alongside the core SAP GUI reports and transactions. The reason Fiori is different is
because SAP have released this as the new version of the SAP GUI and are putting a lot of effort into writing Fiori
apps to replicate functionality of the standard SAP system. These apps are also available for free to all SAP
customers (the one caveat is that some of them require Hana so you can't use these unless you have Hana,
many don't require Hana though). They have also stated that anything new they create will use the SAP Fiori/SAPUI5 route.
SAP UI5 and the future of ABAP
Fiori apps are developed using SAPUI5 which is based on HTML5, JavaScript and JQuery along with custom SAP specific
libraries. Like many of the other web platforms ABAP is still the key language for accessing the date on a
SAP backend system. Within Fiori/SAPUI5 the ABAP code is accessed via OData services. I don't want to go into
this too much here but the OData service allows access to class methods which can select data from SAP tables or
perform other types of ABAP processing before passing values back to the Fiori app. Plus standard ABAP reports etc will still
be in demand for a good few years so no need for ABAPer's to panic yet, just have a look at complimenting technologies
such as HTML5, CSS, Javascript and jQuery if you haven't already done so.
SAP - SAPUI5, Fiori and new UX - Getting Started
Learn SAP UI5 and Fiori in simple way, this course will equip you with knowledge, skills and real life experience.
Check out this and other Fiori courses
More info on SAP Fiori
Getting started with SAP Fiori (inc usful links and demo systems!)
Adding Fiori Apps to your SAP launchpad
Install SAP Web IDE local trial version
Create your first app using the SAP Web IDE
Create an OData Gateway Service using SEGW