ABAP_to_the_Future

13
SAPUI5
13.7 SAPUI5 vs. SAP Fiori
If you’ve heard about SAPUI5, it’s likely that you’ve also heard about SAP Fiori.
Although it seems like the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, SAPUI5 is
not the same thing as SAP Fiori. SAP Fiori refers to a set of applications that were
built using SAPUI5 and that can be cust omized using SAPUI5. (Kind of like how
all the standard SAP transactions are wr itten in ABAP, and you can write your
own Z ones.)
The idea here is the diametric opposite of how SAP has approached building UIs
in the past. Traditional SAP screens are viewed using your desktop, and they are
crawling with fields and tabs and cont ext menus, enough to satisfy every company
in every industry in every country of the world. Each individual company
would only use a few of those fields an d tabs, however. The applications using
those screens have an enormous amount of functionality (i.e., you can do about
34 different things from one screen).
An SAP Fiori screen, in contrast, is desi gned to be viewed on a smartphone or
some such and performs one task only, showing you the absolute bare minimum
of screens and buttons; one screen and one button is the ideal (e.g., to approve a
leave request).
SAP initially came out with about 25 SAP Fiori apps to handle common SAP tasks,
and this was going to change the way people thought about using SAP. Sadly,
initially SAP was going to charge for this in addition to the normal license fee,
when their competitors were giving out UI improvements for free as part of standard
maintenance. In early 2014, commo n sense prevailed, and since then SAP
Fiori and another product called Screen Personas have been bundled into the
annual maintenance fee with no extra ch arge. More SAP Fiori applications are
being released over time in “waves.”
SAP Screen Personas
Since about 1998, there has been an SAP pa rtner company called Synactive, which
made a product called GuiXT, of which the core product was free, with separately
licensed add-ons. What this did was enable you to move fields around the screen on
standard SAP transactions, rename fields to suit the language of your company, add pictures,
and merge screens to some extent. The underlying DYNPRO application was
unchanged; GuiXT was just a layer on top.
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