hi Jerry,

I find your posts interesting, and I was reading a few of them when I came to this one. I’d like to point out that is not just ‘students’ or fresh graduates who makes comparisons.. in fact, anyone trying to stay on the edge do tend to work with different technologies or frameworks and always compare them, pros and cons – even if you don’t make a list of points, we tend to compare in our heads when using them.

Now, I understand you work for SAP and you probably have this feeling of ‘protecting’ SAP and its software, however there is no plausible scenario that UI5 would beat any of the open source competition.. absolutely no scenario, and people need to be extremely naive (or biased) to even try to justify that.

You’ve just compared UI5 with Vue, and somehow you will tell me or you want to preach that doing a jQuery.innerHTML and modifying the whole DOM tree, MULTIPLE AND MULTIPLE TIMES is better than current approaches using VDOM and diff algorithms to only modify the nodes & attributes needed? – The FocusHandler in UI5 takes roughly 5ms to run in my i7-4770k – it takes 5ms to find out and apply focus because UI5 destroys the node. Every single rendering pass in UI5, even when you schedule DOM manipulations to happen to a low threshold per animationFrame (it’s not even animation frame but rather a setTimeout on 0ms) triggers a warning in my Chrome because it exceeds 16ms, which means UI5 cannot hold a steady 60fps, which should be piece of cake for any real optimized framework.

Considering ‘Enterprise Grade’, or an Enterprise Application, you are also being naive.. Somehow you will tell me that UI5 has better “track record” than Angular, React or even Vue? – About the so called controls, you can find really well maintained libraries which implements not “Fiori” but Material Design – I won’t even come into the merit of Fiori vs MD, but chances are, any “Enterprise User” has had some MD experience thru Google Search… this is the “guideline” we’re talking about, just the most used website of the planet uses it.. show “something” outside SAP that uses Fiori please.

Or let’s consider ‘Enterprise Grade’ as a not a tiny application.. because let’s face it, some websites built in Angular & React would be considered “tiny”, like this list here.. https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/sites-using-react and I will let you find out about Angular yourself.. I mean, whatever you build with UI5, no matter how good you are, won’t come close to serving some websites as big as the ones I’ve listed.. you simply ‘cannot’ expect that a framework that downloads a few mb’s of javascript which the majority you are not even using (due the nature of how libraries are treated in UI5) to be acceptable in a ‘high-traffic’ website.

What happens in reality is, companies running SAP believe that SAP can offer ‘the best’ to them, so most decision maker people do not go into the process to find out pros and cons, they want what’s easier for them to manage, and if everything fails, everything goes wrong they will tell the stakeholders: “I’m sorry, I went with SAP which is a major vendor, I’ve been paying top dollars for developers, it’s not my fault” – even internally, SAP cannot cope with UI5 demand, reason why S/4 1610 now has over 6 thousand “Fiori” Applications that run over WebGUI – or I’d go even beyond, the absolutely majority of “facing” websites that holds the SAP logo are not built with UI5, apart from the SDK (which I’m aware of, so please link something if actually exists!).

About updates, the “contestants” receive quicker updates than UI5.. Angular has nearly the same age as UI5 and it has been thru major changes, to keep competitive and implement up-to-date practices. And as “with Fiori you can receive continues updates from SAP”, this is hardly the case.. with Fiori, you need a FES installed, which in some cases it’s not what happened because on the “decision making document” SAP was still directing some customers to install the FES/GW as embedded.. Considering you have a FES standalone, you’d need a Basis Patch, and every major version of UI5 seems to come with a bump in ABAP Kernel – so this is not practical at all, and because it’s an Basis Patch, every customer would enter in their “patching agenda”, where you need a set date, you need resources to retest everything, etc.. – Consider now Angular, React or Vue.. you download the new version, update dependencies in the applications, re-deploy. DONE, zero Basis, you’d still need to test but good practices would tells you’d have the automated tests.. you run those, this is all that’s been modified.. you can’t do that when you patch basis components, even if they have nothing in common it may introduce bugs in the stack.

I mean, I can write, write, write.. UI5 “could” be good, UI5 wasn’t bad when it came out, UI5 did not evolve and it has to – however, my personal opinion is that SAP would built a new framework that adopts better methods and current market practices and call it something else.

I won’t even go into React Native and NativeScript.. it’s not fair to UI5 as 10 developers working for SAP would never be able to compete with thousands and thousands of developers around the globe working together to evolve the platform.

Keen to hear a reply, either here or by private message!

Cheers,
Dan.