Is Web Dynpro obsolete?

[hardyp180]

Dear ABAP Developers,

I was at the SAP Developer and Architect Summit in Sydney the other day and got talking to some consultants I have known for years from the company Oxygen.

They tell me they have hardly any work regarding Web Dynpro any more - everything is now UI5.

This did not actually come as a bowel quaking gut wrenching shock. Many people have pointed out that UI5 looks better than Web Dynpro and runs faster as well, and as far as I can see it even seems easier to develop a UI5 application than a Web Dynpro one, unless of course you are terrified of scary new things like Javascript & XML, many old school ABAP programmers react to the idea of Javascript like a vampire reacts to a cross.

I was even reading a blog the other day about UI5 applications that can even work offline using a framework called "neptune" and then re-synchonise with SAP when the mobile device returns to an area with connectivity. I think perhaps Web Dynpro would struggle with that one.

However a lot of development at SAP still seems to be happening around the Floorplan Manager (FPM), a technology which makes it a lot easier to create Web Dynpro applications in a consistent fashion. With every release this (FPM) gets bucket loads of new features so SAP must still have lots of developers working on FPM, though probably nowhere near as many as are working on Gateway/UI5.

As a test I went into the 2014 TECHED && DCODE web site and did a search for the word "floorplan". I got 9 hits and some of the sessions looked quite interesting.

I then did a search on "UI5" and got 162 hits. Is this an indication of the relative weighting SAP puts on these two products?

You could say that that disparity is just because UI5 is shiny and new and thus getting hyped. However I truly believe UI5 is a good product and possibly even the saviour of SAP's long standing "rubbish user interface" reputation.

So what does everyone else think?

Is there still a place for Web Dynpro in the brave new world of SAP, is the FPM going to raise it to new heights?

Or is UI5 the asteroid that will wipe out the Web Dynpro dinosaurs?

Cheersy Cheers

Paul

[Katan]

Like everything I guess it's all relative to customer adoption.  At the client I am working at and also amongst my old colleagues I don't see as much traction relative to the noise being generated around UI5.  Although that maybe due to my poor choices of working at less innovative clients, but that's a different issue. To that end I see it hanging around for a little while longer yet.

That said, I get a real good vibe about UI5.  I've been playing around with it for a few months and it gives so much more flexibility than Web Dynpro does & looks heaps better.  Let the ABAP grumps complain.  As developers, we need to keep learning, which was one of the key messages at the Developer & Architect summit. With a bit of effort understanding HTTP Communication and Javascript development are all achievable.  It's all relative to the amount of effort you as an individual wish to invest.  Definitely easier than when they tried to convert ABAP Devs to Java Web Dynpro.

A while ago I wrote this and I stand by it.

http://scn.sap.com/blogs/katan_patel/2014/01/08/whats-an-old-abap-developer-supposed-to-do

My key point from this blog would be and still is, to learn to walk, before you run.  It will make the transition so much easier..

[hardyp180]

The funny thing is, that new SAP technology sometimes takes a long time to get mainstream adoption, and by a long time I am talking 5 to 10 years or longer which is an eternity in IT.

It does not help that IT departments are terrified in investing time and resources (i.e. money) into something that might be obsolete in short order.

Web Dynpro Java - as mentioned above - is a case in point. When that was invented it was the "go to" technology, the future of everything, and now it is as dead as a dodo.

Without naming names I know some companies who had all their ESS/MSS applications on Web Dynpro Java and SAP says "no no, convert to Web Dynpro ABAP" and so they did, and after a lot of time and effort the day they were finsihed, the very day, SAP comes along with "HR Renewal" and says "no, no, convert to UI5".

I can see how such a situtaion would put someone off. UI5 is supposed to be more future proof however, with the SAP side (Gateway) being tied to the ODATA protocol as opposed to UI5 specfically.

The question has to be for everybody out there - if you are not yet using Web Dynpro - and I suspect a lot of people are not - and suddenly need a new web based application of some sort that needs SAP data - would you even consider using WDA, or would you jump straight into UI5?

Put another way - where I work we have never made the switch to WDA, every ERP application runs in the SAP GUI - soon we will need such web type things - is there any reason, any reason at all, why we should still be looking at WDA?

Cheersy Cheers

Paul

[matt]

Using Javascript has been part of SAP development before UI5 came along - it's part of most BSP applications I've developed. And we used it extensively in the BPS (confusing, huh?) developments of five or six years ago.

Web dynpro is good for whipping up quick applications. You can certainly get something working far faster - and better constructued - than you ever could with BSP. I've been working quite a lot with web dynpro for the past three years or so - I can't see a particular need to go to UI5. I've also been doing some consulting concerning GRC, which involves web dynpro.

When I hear a consultancy saying "x is dead, y is the new x", what they usually mean is "y is the latest hot thing that we can make money out of selling knowledge to customers who haven't got any in house knowledge - and we can't sell knowledge of x, because the customers do have that in-house."

I'm not saying UI5 isn't essential for certain applications, but I doubt it will replace web dynpro any time soon. Mind you, this year I developed a standalone application. If I was to do it again in 2015, I might be tempted to try it in UI5, just for the experience.

[hardyp180]

You are bang on right about consultant companies, but that is the way they have always been and always will be.

I am probably in a unique position - I never had to write a "proper" Web Dynpro application for use in anger until this year (2014) at almost exactly the same time I had to write my first UI5 application for use in anger.

Before I had aways used DYNPRO and ALV. How backwards. Tut Tut. I had coded a BSP application once - at the Brisbane TECHED hands-on session in 2001 - and the need never arose again.

After going through the Web Dynpro and UI5 learning curves at the same time I found the UI5 framework was a lot easer to get my head around even coming from a DYNPRO/ALV background.

It helped I have been putting so much effort into learing about OO programming in the last few years.

The UI5 thing clearly enforces the MVC model, which I am not really sure the Web Dynpro framework does e.g. you can put business logic like database SELECT statements in the view if you so desire (this is "forbidden" by SAP but I tried it just for kicks and you do not get a syntax error or anything) and some of the "controller" components are not really controllers at all, and there is nowhere really to put the model.

In Web Dypro you can put the model in the assistance class but I get the feeling this is not what the assitance class was intended for, or in fact you can put the model anywhere you feel like, or not even have one and spread the model logic out over the view and controller, hence the internet debate as to the best place to put a model (I have read two SAP Press books, both saying to put the model somewhere different).

I know where the model is in UI5 - it's inside the SAP system! The view and controller are not, and if the view is in XML that means the model, view and controller are all in different languages (ABAP / XML / JavaScript) which is a fairly clear separation as far as I can see.

Anyway, philosphical debate aside, the question I really want to know is that at the current time (December 2014) is Web Dynpro in widespread use at the majority of SAP customers?

If so then that really is a victory for consultant companies as it is the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my life - even counting the mirror - and runs about as fast as a greyhound that has had all its legs cut off and then been shot. I use two Web Dynpro applications - BRF+ and the leave request screen in ESS - and have spent many enjoyable hours looking at a little circle whirling round, wondering what was wrong with the poor old hourglass.

I agree there is not a need to go to UI5, if the need was to run on a mobile device then Web Dynpro presumably filled that gap, I was more thinking of when organisations have to create new applications in the future.

Where I work we have a separate web team from the ABAP team, and for the last X years the Web Applications have been written in whatever the latest technology is at the time - Angular JavaScript at the moment as I understand it  - which then does RFC calls to the SAP system. The UI5 model does not seem a radical departure from that.

It's Christmas now, so does BSP represent the "Ghost of Web Applications Past", WDA the "Ghost of Web Applications Present" and UI5 the horribly scary "Ghost of Web Applications Yet To Come"?

As Scrooge said of the latter "it is you, spirit, I fear most of all".

[dhruv_mehta]

It will replace webdynpro for sure. I have just now finished working in cloud for customer and in html5 it looks so much better plus all devices ipad , iphone , pc was supporting html5.. new era is definately mobile , tablet enabled work and html5 does that job quite well imho.. So to be very frank i have not worked in SAPUI5 but i am looking forward for it... Btw I started as old school abaper ,pved to sap crm and now Clod for CRM ( customer).. So i am eager to learn new html5... and the above comment x is new y and all c'mon if the changes wont come who would do new r&d! changes has to come and i think by 2020 SAP will  be a cloud and Ui5 oriented company if abapers like me are not going to support whole SAP will be at big problem as they wont have consultants... I hope we all should take new things gracefully and it's fun

[matt]

In all the WD applications I've written, performance has never been an issue - they're perfectly responsive.

I put the model in a separate class to which the assistance class (which I treat as the controller) holds a reference. The methods of the view and component controller are only used for those tasks that I need references to the context and other parts of the wd api. So in a supplier method, there will be a call like

baryons = wd_assist->get_baryons( ).

which is then bound to the context,

and within the assistance class something like

r_baryons= me->standard_model->get_baryons( ).

[matt]

WD supports HTML5 (a bit... if someone can figure out how to integrate JQUERY with it, that would be useful).

Dhruvin Mehta wrote:

It will replace webdynpro for sure.

Frankly I doubt it. You see, not all web development is cloud based, nor is required to run on mobile technology. Nor will it ever. SAPGui is still going strong and applications using classic dynpro continue to be developed. I foresee rather three technologies each with their own strengths and weakness and particular applicability.

I've heard the demise of SAP techologies predicted many times in the 17 years I've been in the business, and it rarely happens.

[Former Member]

I attended TechEd in Vegas this year and the message was clear. UI5 is the way of the future. The keynotes speaker said that EVERY development team at SAP has a transition to UI5 in their roadmap.

Now having said that. Lets be very clear... UI5 is just a javascript library. It's not a "UI technology" it's not something SAP invented. It's not a closed, proprietary language. It's just a way to make your own javascript applications look like SAP's Fiori apps.

If UI5 is the future of SAP then it's not because SAP invented some cool new UI technology. It's because they finally realized that they suck at UI and joined the modern world of HTML5 and Javascript.

As far as the company I work for... We will never see a "UI5" application.

[hardyp180]

A Long Long Road A-Winding

I was once staying at a hotel in the UK with some  colleagues and it was a converted country manor, so had no lifts, and so to get from your room to the exit (reception) you had to walk down loads of corridors and up and down stairs.

One of my German colleagues used his phone to take a video of his walk from the room to reception, which was about four and a half minutes of going up and down stairs and down corridors and what have you. He noted the exact time of the vide recording, found a piece of music that lasted the exact same time to the second and showed us the video of the walk with the musical accompianment.

I wanted to do the same with creating a simple BRF+ application using that tools Web Dynpro front end to highlight how much of the time is spent looking at the whirling circle, but whenever I have my phone or screencam software ready the little man inside the computer knows and speeds the application up. He did the same when I was on a screen share with Carsten Zeigler.

The problem only occurs when no-one else is looking, usually just before a tight deadline. This agrees with the law of physics that states you cannot observes something without affecting its state.

The (standard SAP) leave request screen always takes ages, but there is only one or two screens to go through, and you can always leave that running in the background while you do other things.

At first I thought it must just be my system, but why do other internet pages always come up really fast? I raced a UI5 application and the same application written in Web Dynpro one against each other, just to make sure I was not going crazy, you can probably guess the result. Neither were as fast as the SAP GUI naturally, but UI5 still came out streets ahead.

I have been told by various SAP experts that this is because UI5 does not have to do a "round trip" every time the user presses a button, and passes less data backwards and forwards generally (whatever that means).

If Looks Could Kill

Here is a quote from Graham Robinson, at an SAP conference I was at here in Australia.

"Do you want to know how bad it looks? I'll tell you - it looks as bad as Web Dynpro. Yes, honestly - it's that bad!"

The Borg say "Assistance is Futile"

Matthews usage of the assitance class just proves my point - everyone uses it differently.

In one SAP Press book you are told to put the methods of the model class there, in another book you are told on no account to use this as the model class.

So sometimes this class is the model, sometimes it is the controller (as in the above usage) and in that same Web Dynpro book it says never to use the assistance class for UI (view) tasks which presumably means you CAN if you want, in the same way you can put model type tasks inside the view.

And is the assitance class not supposed to be all about texts hence the inherited methods from the interface? What about classes doing "one thing" only?

Whenever I find that no two people ae using the same thing for the same purpose I have to suspect the purpose of the "thing" is fuzzy to say the least.

Never Say Die

You are correct about nothing ever dying, you just get more choices as time goes on.

SAPSCRIPT refuses to die, and SAP could not kill business workflow - they stopped development for ten years, that did not work, and then they caved in and gave it the modern ABAP editor in SWO1.

A few years back (2011) at one company I even heard about reports being written - MANDATED to be written - using WRITE statements because the ALV "was too much extra work".

So if WRITE statements are still alive and kicking I imagine all the sucessors up to and including Web Dynpro are petty much here too stay for a very long time.

As mentioned earlier, the only real way to stop using something is if you never start using it in the first place....

Cheersy Cheers

Paul

[Former Member]

Paul, as usual I enjoy reading what you write and I generally agree with what you say. However........... I must say.......... it's **** terrifying that people are using WRITE statements instead of ALV because it's too much extra work. That makes me worry for the future of ABAP and my job

[matt]

I don't know. If there are people with such low skill levels that they think that ALV is "too much extra work" - in dumb mulish opposition to the true facts - then surely it makes it easier for us to shine.

[Former Member]

Paul , i am writing UI5 code from past 1 year and i have seen some issue which it have too like you can actually by pass business logic with front end if you are smart enough ,getting the UI5 application to work across all browser is difficult , it has serious cache problem and initial loading time issues but apart from all why still i love UI5 because it is a promise for the me that i can think in a lots of creative ways and can use any exciting technology with UI5 as javascript is very flexible and now i can use webrtc to use device hardware without knowing device specific architecture or code , node.js can be used to run it in hardware like raspberry pie, i can now use drones to communicate with SAP,now i can build application which can run in dual desktop(or any number of monitors using media query) and  on top of it the UX and UI looks amazing and lot simple and easier to work .

It was not easy to learn UI5 and work initially but like all change it was hard at first , messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.

-Cheers

Ajay

[Former Member]

ABAP is meant to be a full programming language that includes effective interaction with the input, SAP has long abandoned that duty leaving programmers naked without the arsenals for effective programming. The ABAP runtime and library is the problem and the bottleneck. The future in computing has taken a sharp turn from screen processing to device controls, SAP should, in fact must, develop a full set of ABAP runtime and libraries with this in mind as soon as possible. SAP spent far too much efforts and money away from ABAP which is the natural mother of everything SAP, it is time SAP rebuilds its fortunes around ABAP, after all, ABAP is pure logic, there is no substitute. WebDynpro was an unfortunate diversion. Other user layers are much worse. ABAP should be able to scale up, down, in, and out able to run on global instances as well as embedded devices anywhere, anytime. Programmers have long been brainwashed believing monolithic means big iron, nothing is further from the truth, Internet of Things is built on the idea of every device being a nano monolithic entity completely independent on its own. Python on Raspberry Pi is a joke, ABAP is the real thing.

An ABAP embedded object is really an instance of a class with very high number of class methods and attributes, the class tree is very flat but broad with most of the methods handling sensor events. HANA must be greatly scaled up or out to handle the real time requirements. All the workflows must be redone with synchronous events and handling on top of a very fast and robust in-memory HANA distributed database which is similar to the Tandem multiprocessing platform but far more granular, this necessitates the dedicated use of ABAP only, any other choice is not realistic.

[Former Member]

SAP must stop fooling around, it is the only hope for real-time ERP's so desperately needed to rescue our totally dead global economies.