SAP Hybrid App Toolkit – Developing Hybrid Mobile Applications

In today’s world, mobile devices and smartphones are becoming an intrinsic part of our life and work. Apps offer solutions to all our requirements like getting the latest news updates, shopping, planning holidays, travel, social networking, and so on. More and more enterprises are also supporting their workforce to use mobile devices to access the corporate network and ensure that work is uninterrupted.

There are different types of apps available, namely, native apps, mobile web apps, and hybrid mobile apps. Native apps are developed specifically for a mobile platform. They can access all the features of the mobile device like camera, calendar, GPS and so on.

Mobile web apps run across mobile platforms. They appear similar to websites and are viewable on the device’s browser. But they cannot access the features of the mobile device. Also, the rendering of mobile web apps does not match the native UI and controls of the mobile device. These apps are developed using SAPUI5 and HTML5.

To bridge the gap between these two types of apps, hybrid mobile apps are developed. These apps run on different operating systems like Android, iOS, and Windows. They can also access the features of the mobile devices.

SAP Web IDE is a browser-based toolkit that runs on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. It enables you to develop SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori apps. SAP Hybrid App Toolkit is a Web IDE plugin that lets you add mobile capabilities to the Fiori apps and develop Apache Cordova hybrid mobile apps.

Hybrid App Toolkit provides the following key capabilities:

• Cordova and Kapsel plugin APIs that can be used to add mobile capabilities to the application. Some supported plugins are camera, contacts, calendar, barcode scanner, device information and so on. Auto code completion and code snippets enable you to use the plugins in your apps and develop hybrid mobile apps for Android and iOS platforms.
• Cordova Facade Preview to preview the hybrid app functionality in a browser, with a single button click.
• SAP Hybrid APP Toolkit Companion App to test the hybrid mobile app on a mobile device or device emulator.

Hybrid App Toolkit includes the following components:

• Hybrid App Toolkit plugin: Provides hybrid app development capabilities to SAP Web IDE
• Hybrid App Toolkit Connector: A locally installed server process that enables SAP Web IDE to connect to the local system’s Cordova development environment
• Hybrid App Toolkit Companion App: A native mobile application that enables a live preview of the hybrid mobile apps on your personal mobile device or an emulator

For more information, see https://help.hana.ondemand.com/webide_hat/frameset.htm.

The Hybrid App Toolkit plugin can be enabled in Web IDE. To download the add-on package that includes the Hybrid App Toolkit Connector and Hybrid App Toolkit Companion App, go to the SAP Store.