The first UI5con of the year took place 24th of March in Frankfurt. It was the second time the event was held in Frankfurt and the third UI5con ever. It didn’t feel like it was only the third time for UI5con as it was so professionally organized. Thanks for that goes to the organizer team! They were also responsible for organizing SAP Inside Track Frankfurt that took place at the same location the day after the UI5con.
So many of the attendees already knew each other beforehand from previous events, from Twitter or from the great UI5 slack channels, that it really felt more like a meeting for good old friends than a typical (business) conference. Unfortunately the event was “sold out” (it didn’t cost anything) so quickly that lots of people could not secure a place.
So what was the conference about? Most importantly it was about meeting old and new friends. In addition it was about sharing ideas and findings related to UI5. There were attendees all over the Europe and the world: from UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, USA, Germany, Poland, Norway, Finland etc. so it really was an international conference. Sessions ranged from technical topics to brainstorming get-togethers.
The day started with a delicious breakfast (thanks to the sponsors) and a kick-off session by the organizers. Then Arnd vom Hofe from SAP talked about how they are trying to spread the UI5 love and what channels they are using and plan to use. SAP is really trying to push UI5 beyond SAP environment and they put much effort on producing content for UI5 that should help achieving the goal. Lack of documentation and good tutorials have previously been somewhat an issue for getting more people into UI5 and getting them get productive with the toolkit.
After Arnd's presentation the sessions divided into two tracks. In track one, Sebastian Wennemers presented his experiments with functional reactive SAPUI5. Functional programming is one of the hype things going on in the general Javascript world and it was great seeing some first-hand experiences of functional programming applied into UI5. Thanks Sebastian for an interesting session. In the other room Markus Braunbeck explained the basics of SAP WebIDE plugins.
Then after a short break, Margot Wollny and Jacky Dittkowski had brainstorming session about ideas for the following UI5cons. Maybe we’ll see some of the results from this session in the next UI5con that takes place in St Leon Rot. Time to mark the date June 30th in you calendars if you have not yet done that. Also the call for papers is still open and I really recommend sending in a paper. Presenting is probably the best opportunity to learn new things and it’s not as difficult as it may feel. The audience in the UI5cons, and in all of these community events, is really supportive and people like to hear about all kinds of things. The presentation need not be anything special or technical. The point is to share ideas and learn from each other. The more diverse the presentations and discussions the more we all learn and get out of them.
In the other track Dominik Rosch and Tobias Trapp shared their bitter sweet lessons from Fiori. Looking forward to the slides from the session as I could not attend it.
After Lunch the sessions continued with Volker Buzek talking about asynchronisity in Javascript and how to tackle complexity it may present. Volker nicely introduced how statelessness and uncertainty of the client-server applications can be utilized to create better apps. In the other room Karol Kalisz talked and showcased about IoT and UI5 so the fortunate ones who attended that session had a climpse into the future.
Next up were Vladimir Hilderink and Nabi Zamani. The former explained some new features of Javascript and what issues they can solve. The latter explained message processing in UI5 and how that can be combined with server-side OData messages. Some ideas gotten also from that session that I need to try as soon as possible. See John Patterson's just released great blog post about the same topic for more info.
Then it was time for me and Teemu Kemppainen to demo how GruntJS tooling can be used to help with keeping your code base consistent and less buggy. Thanks for all the attendees! There were so many of you. In the other session, Manuel Blechschmidt showed how UI5 and Java EE can be combined to create apps in the Amazon Cloud.
After those sessions everyone went outside for a group picture. Too “bad” it was so sunny that most of the people could not see where the camera was. 😉
Next up were Martin Hoffman and Meredith Hassett. Martin demoed how well Fiori and SAP Business Client fit together. Meredith came all the way from the West Coast of USA to talk about the #APIFriday series. If you’re not familiar about the series now is the time to fix that.
Last session of the day was held by Twan van den Broek and it was about the #UI5Top5. #UI5Top5 was a “competition” for showcasing UI5 apps and in this session the winners were presented. Great to see so many different kinds of apps created with UI5 and congratulations for all the participants!
After #UI5Top5 the event was wrapped-up and most of the attendees went for a well deserved dinner. Some even continued to the sitFRA the following day to learn about other things, such as ABAP and the SAP Cloud, and meet even more great people. Even if this write-up is about UI5con I really have to thank Katarina Fischer and Denise Nepraunig about their great talk about diversity in IT. Thank you for such a thought provoking presentation!
And thank you all who I had the privilege to talk and share experiences with during the 2 days in Frankfurt and see you in the following UI5 conferences!
- SAP Managed Tags:
4 Comments
