Over the last decade, UI5 Tooling became the best-in-class tool to develop UI5 projects. It offers a range of features to make your life as a developer easy when serving and building projects using the powerful UI5 framework. In this blogpost, I'll explain the reasons behind the renaming of "UI5 Tooling" to "UI5 CLI".
History
In 2018, when we released the initial version of UI5 Tooling, we used the rather technical-sounding term "UI5 Build and Development Tooling". Already in 2018, we had several discussions about which name would fit best for the project and at that point in time we came up with the shortened term "UI5 Tooling".
Right from the beginning, we've designed UI5 Tooling modular and extensible, which led to a large and highly engaged community offering various extensions. It's amazing to see how many builder tasks and server middlewares are developed and maintained by the UI5 community. The UI5 community plays a crucial role in the whole UI5 ecosystem. Currently, UI5 Tooling comprises six packages, namely @ui5/cli, @ui5/server, @ui5/builder, @ui5/project, @ui5/fs and @ui5/logger. Despite this modularization, most developers only use@ui5/cli, which includes all the other packages. As you might notice, there is no package name including the term "tooling". This led to the situation that many developers talk about "UI5 CLI" when in fact talking about UI5 Tooling. So we're having two terms for the same project, which is not ideal.
In 2019, the first version of SAP Fiori tools was released. SAP Fiori tools is a project developed by SAP and offering a wide range of tools to develop SAP Fiori applications more efficiently. It's not only focusing on UI5 but also on further aspects, such as e.g. SAP Fiori elements. SAP Fiori tools contains UI5 Tooling and puts additional functionality on top. If you develop an SAP Fiori application, SAP Fiori tools is the right choice for you. In the meantime, some modules of SAP Fiori tools have also been open-sourced. In 2019, SAP Fiori Tools decided to choose "@sap/ux-ui5-tooling" as its package name, which highlights perfectly the close relationship to the underlying UI5 Tooling project. However, these similar names led to a lot of confusion in the SAP customer and open-source community base. There is no "@ui5/tooling" package on npmjs.org but a package called "@sap/ux-ui5-tooling", which is not UI5 Tooling but actually SAP Fiori tools. That's confusing.
Motivation
Over the last years, it turned out that keeping the term UI5 Tooling led to much confusion on the consumer side, which then resulted in an increasing support effort on our side. So, we made up our minds over several iterations about what would be the best new name for our tool. Finally, we settled on the term UI5 CLI as our successor term for UI5 Tooling.
Good to know
First, and very importantly, this rename does not affect / disrupt your coding. The packages published on npmjs.org won't change their names.
We have migrated the former https://github.com/SAP/ui5-tooling repository to its new home https://github.com/UI5/cli on the newly created UI5 GitHub organization. Links to the former repository will be redirected to the new location. Nevertheless, we highly recommend to update your bookmarks. We'll use this new repository as a monorepo containing all UI5 CLI-related projects. The other UI5 CLI-related repositories will stay on the SAP GitHub organization and hold the source code for Version 4 and prior releases. The new monorepo contain the source code for the next major version, for which we'll start the development phase soon, as well as the documentation for all UI5 CLI releases.
There are already plenty of new features planned for UI5 CLI and we're looking forward to giving you an update on them soon.
Bluesky
