My Journey to Web Dynpro

[Former Member]

Web development is getting hotter and hotter every day. Few years back when I was at college my perspective was web development is for website. I had no idea that web development will be used for developing huge data related applications. It was when I first met my senior who was working on a college student record maintenance project (call it an ERP for college) I came to know that web development can be used for developing such applications. It didn’t fell into shape for me at that time. Later at the end of that project he gave me a demo on which I understood it’s the right platform for huge data related systems. Pretty look and feel, nice layouts, good modularization, variety of tools available and just a browser to run the application. Everything fascinated me.

I realized that web development is going to be the future of computing. And I also understood that I have realized it quite lately. From then on I spent my time learning many good web technologies which was quite interesting. One of the best ways to learn is to trying to reverse engineer the things you see. And this is a lot possible in web development as you view the client side source. Tried to reverse engineer and understand everything from Google to Facebook. I learnt new things every day and from then on I decided that it is going to be my playground. I was waiting for my career of web development to start.

Unfortunately and fortunately I got into SAP ABAP sometime back. I was trained in reporting and module pool programming. I was totally unhappy with screen programming coming from a web development background. I was thinking ‘Why SAP is so backward in technology? When rich web technologies are available why they are still using those old technologies?’. It took some time for me to understand that it was not so. When I learnt Webdynpro recently I understood that I was totally wrong.

Web Dynpro amused me to a level that I wish to call it the best web technology available (standard business applications). Whenever I learn a technology I tend to compare it with the other technologies I know. Web Dynpro outshines everything from the easy application development of .NET to the highly scalable Java. If you have ever tried a small piece of work done in Web Dynpro using any other general technologies, I’m sure that you would praise Web Dynpro for what it is.

The architecture of Web Dynpro is something that wonders me. I wish to say ‘You have done a great job!’ to the team who came with such a design. The concept of context and controllers are out of the box thinking. It gives a pure MVC separation. They have made the best use of web technologies such as Javascript to achieve this. Though some people would point issues like less flexible designing features, I would tell that standard business applications have to be like that.

Web technologies are growing in an exponential curve every day. HTML5, CSS3,  jQuery are some of the hottest of them. With HTML elements like <canvas>, CSS3 styles such as gradients, shadows and rounded borders and the impressive jQuery, lots of great UI elements can be made. When such technologies are exploited by Web Dynpro, the range and usability of applications that can be built is huge. I hope that SAP would be working to make Web Dynpro a lot greater than what it is today. The web revolution has just kicked off. No doubt we are going to enjoy every bit of it.

- Fareez Ahamed