Skip to Content
Actions

SAP UI5 VS WebDynpro

January 30, 2014 | 5,148 Views |
Follow RSS

SAP UI5 framework is getting rapid popularity among SAP web application developers.  Also, SAP has big plans on Fiori, the ready to use mobile web applications on SAP, built on SAP UI5 & SAP Gateway.

Moving from WebDynpro to UI5 development is a major shift in the development approach and skills. With this document, I wanted to highlight the key differences between these two commonly used UI frameworks from SAP.

Features SAP UI5 Web Dynpro
Usage scenarios
  • Application to be used both on desktop and mobile devices
  •  Casual usage scenario, targeting non SAP users
  •  Simple screens
  •  Fit for building stateless apps, both SAP and non-SAP
  •  To build desktop based web applications
  •  Suitable for developing custom UI for complex SAP business Transactions
  •  Simple and complex screens
Development Skills
  •   HTML/HTML5
  • Javascript/JQeury
  • CSS
  •   Java – for WebDynpro Java
  • ABAP–for WebDynpro ABAP
Platforms & tools
  •   SAP Java stack
  • SAP ABAP stack
  • SAP HANA XS
  • Non SAP Web Application servers like TOMCAT
  • Eclipse with UI5 plugins
  •   SAP Java stack – for WebDynpro Java
  • SAP ABAP stack – for WebDynpro ABAP
  • NetWeaver Developer Studio(NWDS) and NetWeaver Development
    Infrastructure(NWDI)
UI Features
  •   Latest web UI features available
  • Ability to customize and extend
  •   Limited UI features
  • Limited extension and customization possible
Browser rendering
  •   Runs 100% on browser
  •   All UI events client side
  •   The applications runs on the server side
  •   Majority of UI events are server side, minimum client side events
Application Performance
  •   High performing due to client side events
  • Browser rendering is faster as HTML content size is minimal
  •   Frequent performance issues due to multiple server round trips
  • Amount of HTML content generated is high, impacting the browser rendering performance
Mobile support
  • Fully supported with dedicated mobile libraries
    for UI
  • Not supported
Models
  • Supports OData,& JSON
  • Supports Java, ABAP, Web services models
UI Design
  • UI design requires extensive coding in HTML and Javascript

(SAP is currently developing new UI5 development
environment with drag and drop features
  • Wizard driven UI design with minimal coding
    required
To report this post you need to login first.

12 Comments

You must be Logged on to comment or reply to a post.

  1. Former Member

    Great summary!!

    Personally I think the ‘Ability to customise and extend’ is the biggest advantage of UI5, no longer do we have to be restricted to the standard web dynpro controls and behaviours.

    Many thanks,

    Jason

    (1) 
  2. John Patterson

    Hi Sujesh

    Nice job.

    Java Webdynpro used to support mobile, guess still does.

    Could be handy to highlight the Browsers supported by Webdynpro as opposed to SAPUI5

    Cheers

    jsp

    (0) 
  4. Former Member

    Thanks for sharing, for myself coming from WDPj I am a fan of SAPUI5 and as commented above by Jason, the extensibility is one of the key features.

    Martin

    (0) 
  5. Tobias Trapp

    I like the blog. In fact one aspect seems to be missing: much of WDA is done today using FPM and this gives many possibilities for configuration, extensibility and componentization.

    Best Regards,

    Tobias

    (0) 
    1. John Patterson

      I agree, I think FPM complements SAPUI5

      I just finished a big development on Hana and we chose ABAP FPM over SAPUI5 Gateway/XSOData as it was a better fit for the solution, WDA on its own wouldn’t have been.

      jsp

      (0) 
  8. shabeer ahmed

    Hi Suresh,

    Thanks for sharing the comparison summary. But i have one query.

    Does SAPUI5 fit for creating ERP screens. Which is easy to create using WDA FPM.

    Regards,

    Shaik Shabeer Ahmed.

    (0) 

Leave a Reply