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Today, we are pleased to announce a major milestone in developing SAPUI5 projects. You can now leverage the latest version of the open-source UI5 Tooling to download and handle SAPUI5 resources in your project.
Dev Experience
In the past, being able to use SAPUI5 in a local development environment of your choice could mean quite a journey. Either you had to manually download and unzip the SAPUI5 SDK or its Runtime part via the SAP Development Tools. Or you had to rely on connectivity to an online hosting of SAPUI5 resources and do the bootstrapping via Content Delivery Network (CDN). Of course, there always is SAP Web IDE as the preferred powerful solution to develop SAP Fiori apps end-to-end and to cover the full-stack application lifecycle.
On the other hand, developers of modern web applications are used to an established ecosystem driven from the command line and building upon Node.js and npm. Just as the UI5 Tooling is leveraged by Web IDE already, you can now also use it as a complementary open-source offering to develop SAPUI5 projects and to integrate it into your existing development landscape.
SAPUI5 Distribution
When the first version of the UI5 Tooling was released about two years ago, it introduced a state-of-the-art way to develop OpenUI5 projects. The OpenUI5 libraries are published as npm packages, so you could use the well-known package concepts and tools used in the Node.js ecosystem.
For SAPUI5, unfortunately, the regular node package management is not sufficient. Unlike OpenUI5 with its uniform version across all the libraries of a release, SAPUI5 comes with a more advanced versioning scheme. The careful combination of more than fifty libraries, often referred to as "SAPUI5 Distribution", is a tried and tested way to ensure enterprise-grade stability. The individual libraries aren’t always re-released for each new SAPUI5 version. Instead, the specific arrangement of libs into an SAPUI5 release is validated by extensive testing and ships with intrinsic compatibility.
UI5 Tooling 2.0
Albeit each SAPUI5 library is published on the public npmjs.com registry, the UI5 Tooling takes the burden off you to configure and manage version dependencies in detail.
As a developer consuming SAPUI5 libraries you just want to specify the overall SAPUI5 version to work with, and all the rest should work out-of-the-box. This is exactly how it has been realized. UI5 Tooling 2.0 supports development of apps for SAPUI5 version 1.76.0 and higher.
Getting Started
Follow the concise Getting Started documentation for initial project setup. Moreover, there is further information on how to consume SAPUI5 libraries or tweaking the Configuration of your project.
Migrate Your Project
Being a major version, UI5 Tooling 2.0 also comes with some breaking changes. While new projects benefit from its evolved capabilities right from the start, existing projects might need some adjustments. Please check out how to migrate your project and stay up-to-date with the latest version.
More Information
For more detailed technical information, a comprehensive blog post has been published that has all the background to help you dive more deeply into this exciting topic. With UI5 Tooling being an open-source project, we are looking forward to your feedback, ongoing collaboration and contributions to further improve the dev experience for SAPUI5 projects.
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