Mobile Patterns for SAP Business Suite

Last week I had the honor to speak about native, hybrid and HTML5 mobile apps at the Mastering Enterprise Mobility with SAP conference in Melbourne (special thanks to Carolyn of the Eventful Group for inviting me, and producing a great event as usual).  If you are not aware, SAP is embracing the leading mobile frameworks, and the developer communities forming around these frameworks.   You could say that in the drive to build a large developer ecosystem around its mobile platform, SAP is embracing the long haired developer. 

An updated version of my slide deck is available on SlideShare here.  In this deck, I firstly discuss the differences between native and HTML5 mobile apps. I describe some of the 3rd party open source frameworks which SAP is embracing either by embedding them into its products or striking partnerships with the framework providers.  This includes jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, and Appcelerator Titanium.  I then attempt to map the various patterns of mobile development which are possible for an on-premise SAP Business Suite customer against the available SAP-provided technology platforms or enablers (in reality, I cannot possibly cover every possible pattern, but the main ones evident to me are discussed). 

The slide deck currently omits discussion of 3rd party mobile platform solutions, as well as SAP’s recent NetWeaver Cloud platform offering, and the increasing focus of SAP on its own HTML5 framework, SAP UI5.  And of course, such is the rate of evolution in the world of mobile that the slide deck will be quickly rendered out of date.

Note: Sometimes I see Afaria and SAP NetWeaver Gateway shown separately from the ‘SAP Mobile Platform’.  Also, SAP has a planned roadmap to unify the various runtimes (eg. SUP and Agentry) over time.