I make no secret that I love developing. My favourite job title is “Chief HR Geek”, I adopt others as the need arises, but as a real in the dirt developer, content is always more important to me than flashy styling.
That’s why I was one of the only attendees at SAPPHIRENow 2014 wearing shorts. It’s fricking HOT in Orlando in June, wearing a suit?! Are you kidding me?
But it’s worth noting that to most businesses in the first instance, flashy styling is worth more than content! BUT – flashy styling with content, that’s awesome.
Fiori
With the announcement of Fiori being available as part of standard maintenance (yar boo sucks to those companies who’ve decided to skip SAP maintenance and have a third party do it) there comes the possibility of a double whammy of flashy styling and good underlying content.
The demo of a CFO drilling down in real-time to underperforming or problematic areas of the business and analysing why was compelling. I think Robbo has written about this as the killer app for HANA. I think he might be right.
But the key thing for a developer here, was the front end that this was achieved with, wasn’t a Business Objects add-on, wasn’t some WDA functionality. It was SAPUI5 over an OData layer exposed by Gateway.
If companies are going to be able to adopt these applications – and more and more of them are coming – there is going to be a clear need to support them.
Using tooling to build UI5 apps using ABAP won’t cut it
Whilst there are some amazing frameworks out there to help migrate stuck-in-the-mud ABAP developers across to building UI5 app, this does not help when there is a need to extend a standard Fiori app. Developers will need to learn JavaScript (or more properly ECMAScript, but that’s just me being pedantic.) If you can’t code JavaScript and refuse to learn, start calculating your redundancy payout because that’s what you’re going to be worth to your company. Alternatively, brush up on your SQL skills – and you can start writing some of the pushdown code for HANA. Either way, ABAP is going to be complementary to either DB manipulation or front-end display, but not a stand-alone skill set.
Fiori extension points
Did you know that many (not all!) Fiori apps have built-in extension points? You can use these to substantially alter the behaviour and appearance of the app. But to do so, there is something you should know – guess what? JavaScript! Whilst the RDE (fingers cross for R to start meaning Rapid in near future) allows for some pretty amazing WYSIWYG modification to apps, the likelihood is that some form of developer intervention will be required. At the very least someone is going to have to figure out if the business requirement can/can’t be met using this simple customisation. And what skill set is going to be needed to figure out what those extensions can/can’t do? Yep you guessed it, JavaScript.
In Summary
For once I’m going to keep to a simple post without the detail that me as a developer I love so much. Because I want to emphasis this message.
I’m eventually learning to understand, unless you have flashy styling (Fiori), it doesn’t matter how good your content is (HANA) you can’t sell it. Combine the two together, and you have something that will change the marketplace and means developers need to change their game.
Perhaps if I ever attend SAPPHIRENow again, I’ll compromise and wear my jeans.