ABAP_to_the_Future

13
SAPUI5
their hands and say, “Well, we cannot use our ABAP programmers, then, because
they just don’t have the right skillset.” Do you know, amazing as it may seem, that
there was a time when I didn’t know ABAP? When I was 14, I programmed in
BASIC, and then at university Pascal was the go. When I started work (as an
accountant, as opposed to as a programmer), on my very first day I discovered
how to record macros and then use the programming language in the spreadsheet
(which would become Visual Basic) to automate boring tasks. Then, when SAP
came along it was time to start writin g programs in ABAP, and then the jump
from procedural programming to OO programming was rather like learning a
whole new language. (Also there are bits of Java all over SAP products now, such
as the graphical mappings in SAP PI, and I had to adjust those from time to time.)
The point is, nowhere in all of this did I throw up my hands and scream “I only
know BASIC! There’s no point in going on in life. I might as well throw myself off
the nearest bridge.” You are a programmer. This is more a way of thinking and
problem solving than knowledge of the sy ntax of a particular programming language.
If you need to lear n something new to solve a problem, learn something
new! And, you should learn JavaScript.
The killer argument is that if you can program on both sides of the fence—the
ABAP side that produces the data and th e JavaScript side that consumes and formats
the data—then that puts you in an incredibly small minority and that has to
be a good thing for your career. At the end of this chapter is a link to a wonderful
article from SAP aimed at introducing ABAP programmers to JavaScript. There
are many differences (e.g., variables that change their data types when you give
them a different value), but it’s not the end of the world. It may be worth taking
a look at that so that the next section (which shows some JavaScript code) makes
a bit more sense.
In this chapter, Section 13.1 looks at the technical architecture of how you can
expose your SAP applications to appear as SAPUI5 applications in web browsers
and mobile devices. It also describes SAP Gateway, which is an SAP add-on that
can be used for this purpose, among many others. Section 13.2 discusses the prerequisites
for creating an SAPUI5 applic ation: what you will need installed in
your SAP system and what you will need installed on the local machine on which
you will be developing.
The bulk of the chapter will then describethe process of creating the ever-popular
Monster Monitor as an SAPUI5 application. This process has several facets:
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