SMP 3.0 – My notes from ASUG Pre Conference

I am attending the SAP TechEd in Las Vegas this week and I did also book myself into the ASUG Pre Conference session on SAP Mobility titled, ‘SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 – Deep Dive into the Next Generation of the Mobile Platform’.

In this blog, I will share some of the notes I made today during the All Day session which I hope will be a quick read providing the audience with insights into what SMP 3.0 is all about.

Key Message: SAP has made the first clear step towards consolidating on the mobile technology. With SMP 3.0, all the mobile features (native, agentry, mobilizer etc) are now executed on a single runtime.

1. The interesting addition I noticed was the launch of Gateway Java. With Gateway Java, now non-SAP data can be OData enabled. There was a comment that Gateway Java will be delivered on HANA Cloud Integration, SAP Process Orchestration and SMP.

There will be plugins in Eclipse for the Gateway Java (GWJ) to help speed the service implementation.

Note: For OData enabling SAP backend, the ABAP Add on, SAP Netweaver Gateway will continue to be used.

2. Everything is OData? – There was a lot of talk about OData. The message, I guess was that SAP seems to be pushing for a strong adoption of OData for most of the mobile needs.

3. Kapsel = Cordova + SAP Plugins. No offline SDK for Kapsel yet. Secure storage is a key feature that comes with Kapsel.

4. JSON is now finally supported on the OData SDK. Recommendation is to use JSON as a best practice instead of XML.

5. One SDK for all platforms. Application are clearly 3 types – Native, Hybrid and Agentry (not to forget Web)

6. Mobile Application Framework (MAF) – Provides a set of reusable components for;

a. AppUpdate

b. AuthProxy

c. EncryptedStorage

d. Logon

e. Logger

f.  Push

g. Settings

7. Client hub – Mocks Afaria like features.

8. Agentry goes OpenUI. Now make your Agentry screens skinable.

9. Death of an ‘angel’ – Agentry communication can now be HTTPs/sockets

10. Offline OData – Offline OData processing possible with the SDK. No caching on the middleware, moving to client caching.

11. MBO still supported. But recommendation is to migrate. Surely we will see the MBO concept being deprecated. New Apps to avoid MBO based approach.

12. As of today no clustering for SMP 3.0. Will be supported later.

13. CTS+ not integrated yet

14. SCC makes way for Admin logon page. Looks very familiar to the cloud version of SMP that was used on the OpenSAP course recently.

15. Gateway SP7 offers delta querying

16. Fiori from being a web app, will soon get its hybrid version via the SMP 3.0 platform.

17. AppBuilder – Now this was again very interesting. It is a Browser-based development tool for easily and quickly building SAP UI5 (HTML5/JavaScript/CSS) mobile applications.It provides designers, easy drag and drop features for development and uses the Kapsel framework for hybrid app packaging. One can also work with charts.

Hope these notes provide at a high level, features that you would see in the SMP 3.0 platform. I will update more about the platform in detail, as I get into sessions and hands on in the coming days.

You can also follow me on twitter ( @shabarishv ) as I would be tweeting during the course of this TechEd.

Feel free to post comments on your thoughts about this blog and hope this made a short but interesting read.