Early in the morning on Valentine’s Day 2020, I set off with my fellow “INNOV8R’s” for UI5con Brussels to attend the informative sessions scheduled for that day. Even after dealing with obstacles like traffic jams and buying parking tickets, we arrived well ahead of time and were able to enjoy a delicious breakfast.
Fiori Performance Improvements
At 9:00 a.m., it was time for the keynote by Stefan Beck and Peter Muessig. The first topic they covered was the performance and startup time of the Fiori Launch Pad and Fiori apps. They’ve been focusing a lot on this recently, and performance has improved significantly as a result. For example, the startup time for the “GL_ACCOUNTANT” group (121 Fiori tiles) has improved from 6.5 seconds to 1.5 seconds. And the “Monitor Purchase Order Items” app’s startup time has visibly improved from 3.4 to 2.1 seconds on first launch. It was also revealed that they aim to achieve a startup time of less than 1 second in the future! This would, of course, be a huge improvement.
Fiori Adoption Experience
UI5 Web Components
The presentation also covered UI5 Web Components. These new Web Components are a set of reusable UI elements that can be used with a minimal footprint for static websites, web apps, or with frameworks such as React, Angular, and VueJS. This allows you to create a consistent user experience that follows the SAP Fiori design guidelines and the Fiori 3 design.
It was also revealed that Web Components will be supported in UI5 in the future. They plan to do this by integrating Web Components back into UI5. As a result, this will soon become the standard way to build platform-agnostic UI elements in UI5.
Integration Cards
The UI Integration Cards were also featured. The Integration Cards offer a new way to display application content to the end user in a uniform manner. The cards can be easily integrated into a host environment, such as an application, dashboard, or HTML page. A variety of card types can be configured by simply modifying a JSON schema, without the need to write code for UI rendering. This way, even end users without programming skills can create new cards tailored to their specific needs.
Fiori 3 Dark Quartz Theme
Another feature that caught my eye—and one I’m really fond of—is the Fiori 3 Dark Quartz Theme. For now, it’s only available for use with SAPUI5 1.72 in combination with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2002, but it will undoubtedly be available for use on all products with Fiori 3 in the future. Besides the fact that, in my opinion, it looks incredibly stylish, it’s of course great for people who work at night or in a dimly lit environment.
SAPUI5 will soon be available for NPM
The icing on the cake—and, in my opinion, the biggest revelation of this UI5con—was the announcement that not only UI5 but also SAPUI5 will soon be available on NPM. This is, of course, very useful for developing SAPUI5 applications in combination with Node.js.
Once SAPUI5 becomes available for NPM, the UI5 Build Tools will also be even more effective. This allows you to load only the parts of the SAPUI5 library that your app actually needs. This provides a performance benefit, but it applies only to standalone apps and not to apps you want to deploy on a Fiori Launchpad.
UI5 Build Tools
Next, it was the turn of SAP Mentor Wouter Lemaire to tell us about the UI5 Build Tools. The SAP Web IDE is , of course, a fantastic development environment for building UI5 apps. But if you want to use a local development environment, you’ll need to adopt a number of third-party tools. These third-party tools work fine on their own, but it takes a lot of time to configure them all so they work properly.
SAP’s solution for this is the UI5 Build Tools. These tools provide developers with the same functionality that SAP Web IDE offers in their local development environment. This is primarily intended for experienced developers who want the freedom to choose their own development environment, such as VSCode.
In this session, Wouter demonstrated step by step how to use these tools with VSCode. In my opinion, he did an excellent job. This includes things like configuring your project, running code checks, building your app, testing your app locally, and deploying the production version of your app.
Wrap-up
We attended many interesting sessions that day, such as: “TypeScript with UI5” by Helmut Tammen, “Don’t Be Scared of CAP—OData V4 Can Work in Production” by Vincent Weiss, and a fantastic “Plugin Showcase” by Tom Doorslaer & Wouter Lemaire. Once again, our minds were filled with UI5 inspiration. We wrapped up the day on a high note with a fun group photo, followed by a cozy Friday afternoon get-together.
Thank you, SAP Belgium and Flexso, for organizing a wonderful UI5con. My colleagues and I learned new things , found inspiration, and had a great time. And of course, we’re looking forward to our next outing on June 19, when we’ll be heading to the spectacular UI5con in Walldorf!
For fans, there’s a video from that day to watch:
