World Class User Experience with Neptune?

(Disclaimer: everything in this post is what we in Sweden call a “guy guess”, I have no actual experience with the product mentioned, only unfounded opinions)

During my quest for the ultimate SAP User Experience, which you can read more about in this blog I’ve come across Neptune for developing Fioiri-like applications. Apparently it’s been around since 2011, but I only started noticing it the last 6 months; I guess my google skills have steadily improved. Please have a look at neptune software, it’s impressive stuff.

Neptune does indeed seem impressive, and I certainly understand the allure of building UIs in Abap. I’m old enough to remember when WD4Abap was released, and die hard Java fans like myself could not understand why anyone would ever base their UIs on Abap, I guess the jokes were on us.

Too me this is the same question, why would anyone ever build world class user experience with ABAP, but we’ll see if the joke is on me again 🙂

I’m certainly impressed with the demos I’ve seen, and compared with building Fiori apps with WebIDE Neptune is on a completely different level. Features like Abap debugging and seamless integration with the transport system are very tempting and something that would speed up our development process considerable.

However I have a couple of doubts going forward:

• Can I trust my UI to an Abap developer (like myself) who thinks that VA01 is state of the art, or should I hire the kids from the web agency that eats HTML5 for breakfast?
• I’m scared sinking lots of effort into a proprietary system that I do now know how long it will be supported
• I kind of like the separation of concerns that come with the REST programming model, I’m afraid mixing UI into my Abap mix will lead to maintenance hell. Though here I’m not sure about all the options Neptune offers.
• Like most organisations we don’t have 100% SAP in house (more like 20%), so even though Neptune can be seamlessly integrated into Fiori Launchpad, FLP still won’t be our main entry point
• If I put my consumer glasses on (the big shiny ones on my profile) I can’t honestly say Fiori, or Fiori-like, is a world class user experience…

The quest goes on, but I will certainly explore Neptune for some use cases