The Year 2021 - SAP BTP SDK for iOS
This year was an excellent year for us native iOS Developers! Not only did we have an exciting WWDC 2021 event where a complete range of new operating system versions got released, but the SAP BTP SDK for iOS Team invested in a range of new Swift Packages and APIs. This Blog Post is about all my highlights from this year regarding the SAP BTP SDK for iOS, with a ton of content for you to check out throughout the holiday session!
As you might know or don't know 😁, SAP is putting out more Open Source code for you to use, contribute and collaborate! In my personal opinion, this is amazing because we can bring you as the community closer together with SAP's developers and product teams. If you're interested in the complete list of repositories available to you, please look at the list of repositories for the SAP organization on GitHub.
The SAP BTP SDK for iOS builds the foundation for us as native business app developers, providing a great set of APIs to integrate and extend the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Not only do we have the core frameworks included in the SDK, but also a whole range of Open Source projects on GitHub covering different use cases or features.
Previously I covered some of them, like the SwiftUI implementation of the UI controls for the SAPFiori framework. You can find the repository, my related Blog Post and SAP TechBytes video right here:
- SwiftUI implementation of the SAP Fiori for iOS Design Language
- An Introduction to the Fiori SwiftUI Open Source project
- The End2End Journey: Advocates App with OData & SwiftUI
My highlights for this year are the Fiori AR Open Source project, the integration with SAP Conversational AI, and the Multi-User support, including its onboarding. Let me introduce each topic shortly and provide reference information for deeper understanding.
Fiori AR
With ARKit, Apple allows us to use the power of augmented reality to enhance the experience of our apps to a new level. With ARKit being quite mature, the release of the Fiori AR brings to the table a set of APIs and ARKit ready UI controls to enhance your business apps with meaningful and exciting functionality! You don't have to create these assets by yourself, think about integration or deep implementation as the SAP BTP SDK for iOS team provides this out of the box. It is a great addition to your toolbox to add AR capabilities to your exciting business apps.
If you're interested in a detailed introduction to the API feel free to read through the
- Building Modern Business ARKit Ready iOS Apps With SAP Fiori for iOS ARKit Blog Post
- and watch my cool SAP TechBytes video, SAP Fiori for iOS ARKit on YouTube
If you have missed it, I have introduced and used this technology in this years SAP TechEd 2021 Developer Keynote. Not only is it a fun keynote video to watch but also packed with great tech and demos. Check out my demo about the Fiori AR right here.
Integration with SAP Conversational AI
SAP invested time and brain-power into building an innovative and simply amazing conversational AI platform. It includes an extensive Chat Bot builder with a wide range of integration options through APIs in order to connect to your bot with ease. The SAP Conversational AI is a simply amazing low-code tool which nicely integrates with the SAP BTP SDK for iOS through the open-source Swift Package SAPCAI. marco.eidinger gives you a great introduction to the package and has additional learning material ready for you to use to get started.
User Onboarding - Multi-User support
Handling users on iOS is pretty straightforward as the operating system only allows you to have one per device. But no worries. SAP has got your back on this and provides you with a super-easy approach to handling multiple users and onboarding them into your app. Using the SAP Mobile Services and the SAP BTP SDK for iOS you get multi-user support almost out-of-the-box.
This is one of my favorite features as the community asked for it for a while and finally we have this ready for your consumption. I have written a blog post so you can get started real easy:
I am currently working on an SAP TechBytes video to show you the process in more detail, so stay curious about that. A good way is to subscribe to the SAP Developer YouTube channel or subscribe to my kevin.muessig#overview.
Widget Extensions with the SAP BTP SDK for iOS
An essential factor of a good iOS developer is to make the user's life as easy as possible. There are a lot of tools available for us as developers to achieve this, and one of them is Widget Extensions in iOS. In the past, it was not possible to create widget extensions with the SAP BTP SDK for iOS, but with Version 6 the feature was finally released for our consumption. The SAP BTP SDK for iOS Assistant can generate the needed classes and settings for us, and you can change your existing project very easily to use widget extensions.
If you want to learn more about the capability of creating widget extensions together with the SAP BTP SDK for iOS, here is one of my Blog Posts for you:
Final Words
Wow! 2021 was a packed year full of new APIs and Swift Packages/Open Source projects. A big THANK YOU to marco.eidinger and the whole SAP BTP SDK for iOS Team for giving us all this new and exciting tech for building even greater business apps for our users out there!
Also, a big thank you to you as our community for reading, watching, and interacting on my and my colleague's content. You are amazing and stay engaged with the strong and constantly growing iOS community within SAP's community!
Please comment below this Blog Post or engage with me on Social Media if there are topics you want to see in the new year.
At last, I want to encourage you to check out the Developer Keynote of this year's SAP TechEd 2021 . You will find the presented topics in the Developer Keynote GitHub repository!
With this, I want to close out my SAP BTP SDK for iOS Highlights for 2021! In my next blog post, I want to give you my insights about my personal experiences for the year 2021 in my Year-In-Review blog post. Stay tuned for this!
As always, Keep Coding!
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