SAP Web IDE VizPacker Plugin vs. Lumira VizPacker Utility

[RazK]

VizPacker is a cool tool. It provides an extension framework with an associated API that lets you customize existing visualizations or develop your own visualization extensions and integrate them with SAP Lumira or other products. Following are a few examples of such extensions. For more exmaples, please visit Lumira - Open Source Visualization Extensions.

VizPacker is available in two ways:

1. An online version is included as a plugin for SAP Web IDE.
2. An offline version for Google Chrome is included with SAP Lumira, desktop

VizPacker plugin was introduced as part of SAP Web IDE 1.6 late last year (Dec/2014). For more information on the VizPacker plugin, please visit SAP Web IDE - Visualizations Without Limits

SAP Web IDE is an extensible development environment with a growing set of embedded tools covering the end-to-end development process. For more information on SAP Web IDE, please visit SAP Web IDE - Overview.

The SAP Web IDE VizPacker plugin lets you rapidly design, build, and deploy visualization extensions based on d3.js. The main benefits of using the VizPacker plugin are:

• Improved developer productivity through wizards, templates, and code editors
• Customize or build visualization extensions
• Source code management
• Testing and debugging

The VizPacker plugin is an additional tool within SAP's high productivity visualization extension toolset. The VizPacker plugin is SAP's recommended way to build and customize extensions. Following is a high-level comparison table between the VizPacker Plugin and the Lumira VizPacker that will assist the extension developer to choose the right tool for the task at hand.

	VizPacker Plugin	Lumira VizPacker
Project Setting
Configure extension settings and layout	√	√
Configure extension using step by step wizard	√	×
Configure data model	×	√
Upload csv file as dataset	√	√
Generate predefined folders and files	√	√
Import/Export project file	√	√
Pack extension file (.zip)	√	√
Manually deploy extension to SAP Lumira	√	√
Offline/local code development	×	√
Coding Experience
Free style coding	√	√
Code completion	√	×
Syntax validation (Javascript Linting)	√	×
Find/Replace in multiple files	√	×
Code beautification	√	×
JAM-based team communication with code collaboration	√	×
Revision Control Software integration  (Git)	√	×
Testing
Side by side Quick Preview	√	√
Customized Preview in different size, desktop, tablet, phone or custom	√	×
Change localization and languages	√	×
Data Binding panel - change data binding	√	√
Data Table panel - view data value	√	√
Update data value in dataset	√	×
Debug using browser's developer tools	√	×
Browser Support
Chrome (latest version)	√	√
Firefox (latest version)	√	×
Internet Explorer 9+	√	×
Safari (Mac)	×	×
In-Product Docs
In-Product tutorials	×	√
API Reference (link)	√	×

--- Raz