Survived week 1: Introduction to Mobile Solution Development

In case you do not know: open.sap.com offers a MOOC focused on mobility: Introduction to Mobile Solution Development

After week 1, my overall impression is that the course content is delivered with a broad audience in mind, touching many areas at once. The focus is of course SAP technology, so do not expect a course that will teach you jQuery Mobile. The offering is a good motivation to learn SAP mobility, SAP’s take on it and SAP’s approach to develop a mobile application. Finally a reason to refresh my oData knowledge.

My overall goal is to stay with the course and to pass the final exam. How I do not know, as the only time free I currently have is during commute from and to work. I am not in the course to get the Record of Achievement, but to have a good motivation to learn SAP’s view on mobility.

My Experience

I almost forgot that the course already started, I accessed the content mid last-week. For those trying to access the course behind a corporate proxy: the videos are hosted on vimeo, I guess for 99% of those this means: no streaming. I thought about downloading the material in the background, but after a few tries I found out that this will stay a dream, at least for the videos.

Why? Download is slow. I have 10 Mbit down at home, and even when downloading it at night, speed is really disappointing.

At work it is even worse, I think the corporate infrastructure is set up to not prioritize mp4 files (that’s OK, btw). While updating my Android SDK, I got this download speed reported:

Wikipedia tells me that 1 KiB/s == 1024 bytes == KB. In that case we have once 133 KB vs. 1259KB. No comment.

The videos sum up for almost 700MB for week 1. I thought in downloading them at once, but given the download speed I guess I will have to do this course without videos at all and rely on the PDFs. The session PDFs contain the valuable theoretical information, the speaker (Craig Haworth) isn’t adding something that is NOT in the PDFs. [1]. A workaround is the transcript PDF. It contains all the necessary information to understand what the video shows. It looks like the text is auto-generated, if not: it’s SCN, not SEN.

Learning by doing

There is a list of software provided that you’ll have to download and configure on your own. No ISO image made available with everything pre-installed. Sad, but doable [2]. A “big” problem is that the examples are not made with people that use a corporate proxy. It’s up to you to find out how to authenticate oData SAP UI calls against the used SAP system in such a way that it works.

For instance, in unit 4, the oData example:

OData.read( "https://sapes1.sapdevcenter.com/sap/opu/odata/sap/ZGWSAMPLE_SRV/ProductCollection?$format=json", function (data) …

This won’t work as it won’t authenticate you against the Gateway service. To know how to authenticate, take a look into unit 5, W1U5_MyFirstIntegratedWebApp

OData.read({ requestUri: "https://sapes1.sapdevcenter.com/sap/opu/odata/sap/ZGWSAMPLE_SRV/ProductCollection?$format=json",
 user: "user",
 password: "password"}

If you now think: that’s it, problem solved: wait until you run the code in Cordova:

For the HTTP request to work in Cordova, it needs to be:

OData.read({ requestUri: "https://sapes1.sapdevcenter.com/sap/opu/odata/sap/ZGWSAMPLE_SRV/ProductCollection?$format=json&sap-user=<user>&sap-password=<password>"}

The workload of week 1 was OK. Getting the examples running took up most of the time, but once this was solved, it was no problem at all to get through the content. And I do most of it on my commute. If only I could download the videos …

What else?

Installing Cordova using NPM

In case you want to do this while being behind a proxy, set the proxy.

npm config set proxy http://<user>:<password>@proxyserver:8080

Although that doesn’t mean it works, especially when the proxy is blocking on a given URL schema. Set up your environment at home, with no proxy at all between you and the internet.

Setup Cordova

You should really go through the Cordova cli documentation. After going through the Cordova introduction example, at least the emulator should start and show the example app.

Make sure – when under Windows – that the path to your project folder for hybrid apps does not contain a space. When you think using week 1 as a folder name is a good choice, be aware that Cordova disagrees with you. Name the folder week1, without space.

What else?

A mobile project can contain quite a lot of files:

This screams for a SSD!

Other blogs in this series from me about the open SAP course: Introduction to Mobile Solution Development

• Survived week 1: Introduction to Mobile Solution Development
  
• Still alive after week 2: Enterprise Mobility Enablement Services
• Any given Tuesday – week 3: Introduction to Mobile Solution Development
• Do apps dream of electric sheep? Week 4
• Remember, all I’m offering is the truth – nothing more – week 5
• Open the pod bay doors, SMP – week 6

[1] Thank you open SAP team and Craig for this

[2] There is a discussion forum provided for the course, and it is full of people having questions how to get the software installed, configured and running