– SAP joins the steady stream of next-gen app development framework news via SAP Web IDE/SAPUI5
– SAP could better outline the line-of-business user’s new role in app development by emphasizing its framework’s codeless abilities
SAP is the latest among app platform vendors to highlight its app development framework approach to simplify mobile app development. During this week’s SAP TechEd && d-code developer conference and amidst all the hoopla around the newest version of SAP HANA, some mobile app development updates did surface. SAP demonstrated the simplified tools behind Web IDE (formerly SAP River RDE) coupled with the SAPUI5 framework, and the ability to push codeless development using Fiori’s drag and drop components. (Note, OpenUI5 is the open source version which provides capabilities that export to Apache Cordova). However, SAP seemed to miss the opportunity to target the IDE environment to a newfound enterprise audience that includes business users.
The industry has seen a slew of new app development framework announcements by the likes of Oracle, IBM, Salesforce, and Kony, each one of them targeting business users. These vendors grasp the importance of marketing new tools that distribute the app development process to a broader set of non-developers, recognizing the daunting task of addressing mounting mobile app development requirements. Heck, SAP’s arch rival in the cloud, Salesforce, practically based its entire conference, Dreamforce, around Salesforce1 Lightning. The UI update brings business users into the fold of simple app development via access to pre-built and reusable components and developer tools which provide a friendlier dashboard with drag and drop functionality.
Other important developer news coming from SAP’s developer conference was an update on the Apigee partnership, which will yield easier access to SAP’s backend systems. SAP is currently reselling the Apigee API management technology, next SAP will integrate Apigee technology with SAP Gateway, making a menu of API connections available to developers within a portal, and next we anticipate SAP to release a cloud version of the API management portal sometime next year.
Current Analysis has just released a new Advisory Report delving deeper into this new phenomenon of client side tools (Please see Next-gen Development Frameworks Drive Democratization of App Development, October 23, 2014). These are crucial because if organizations don’t recognize the need for more collaboration between business users and designers/developers, they’re destined to fail.
