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vvdries
Contributor


Community Conferences around OpenUI5 / SAPUI5

 

Hello community,

Today we are one week further, and I can tell I’m still enjoying my first SAP UI5con (2020 Belgium) experience.

In the past I attended some SAP Inside Tracks as an attendee and a speaker, but I must admit as a UI5 lover this kind of events are just simply amazing. I attended my first one as an attendee and speaker!

What makes this event so amazing? Well like I said, if you are really interested in SAP UI5 you will enjoy every second of the day. Because every session that you will attend is all about UI5.

Coolest thing about this event?

I don’t have to think about it. I came to the event with some questions and I left with answer, without even asking. Wonderful presentations will enlighten you and your questions.

Don’t get me wrong. If you do not have any questions, you will still love it! Just because you will see so much cool stuff and ideas. Remember these events or about sharing knowledge but defiantly also having fun!

The breaks and lunch times are the perfect way to connect and share your interests or just to have a nice chat about anything. ?

Seems awesome right? Well where did this event take place? This year was the first SAP UI5con in Belgium and let me show you right away where it was THIS YEAR (2020).



Obviously, I did not take all the pictures myself. Credits to all the Tweeters among us in the Community. Awesome pictures you guys tweeted! Keep sharing!

 

Where?


The event took place at the very own SAP Belgium Office in Evere Brussels. Where will it be next year? No idea, we will see!

SAP Belgium

Olympiadenlaan 2

1140 Evere

Belgium

Evere, Brussels - Belgium

SAP Belgium Office



 

When?


Like I said one week ago.

Wait that’s the 14th right? Yes, it is! The 14th of February. Awesome!

There is not better Valentines gift than a UI5con event on this day! ?

 

Who was there?


Well there were a lot of attendees with a big love for UI5.

Way too many to mention them all in here, but super nice to meet you all!

Obviously, no attendees without speakers, here is a list of all the speakers that have foreseen us with some nice sessions:

  • Alexander Seibel

  • Dries Van Vaerenbergh

  • Fabienne Pipping

  • Greg Malewski

  • Helmut Tammen

  • Marius Obert

  • Nicolas Lunet

  • Nitish Mehta

  • Peter Muessig

  • Robin Panneels

  • Stefan Beck

  • Thomas Nelissen

  • Tom Van Doorslaer

  • Vaibhav Arora

  • Vincent Weiss

  • Volker Buzek

  • Wouter Lemaire


Wow quite a list! What did you guys do that day? I will get to it right away!

 

What were we up to that day?


As I mentioned earlier, it is one of the most amazing events I know.

But what can you expect during such a day?

You can expect to have a lot of fun and see some super cool stuff. This during a Lighting Talk where the speakers will obviously enlighten you with some amazing stuff in 20 minutes. On the other hand, you can brace yourself for a Lecture. A lecture is a 40 minutes session where you will be taken on a journey through development, coding, demos and more. Two awesome ways to present and attend a session.

Now let me guide your through this day from the start.

 

Welcome to UI5con Belgium 2020


Demo room 2 was totally prepared to kick off the first UI5con Belgium 2020 event. This room decorated and prepared by the people in the back! Wait who?



Yes us! Nice to meet you! We are the Flexso Digital team! A cool and enthusiastic team that exists out of people in this picture and so many more who are not in it!



Infrastructure ready, team ready, time to kick off this Keynote!

 

Keynote


stefan.beck  peter.muessig


During the Keynote Stefan and Peter placed a functional and technical spotlight on “OpenUI5/SAPUI5” and they took us on a trip through the Fiori evolution as well. No more questions when it comes to Fiori Development or Adoption Experience! All clear!









An amazing secret has been revealed to us all and it is the following:

SAPUI5 goes NPM!!! ?



 

GET STARTED WITH THE NEW UI5 TOOLING


c3d1947136cd4c748a7aa794001af496


I was not able to attend Wouter Lemaire his session because I was Track Host in Demo Room 3. But I bet you rocked the stage with an amazing session!

Here is a brief summary what Wouter his session was about:

Now with the new UI5 tooling, SAP provides a solution that closes the gap between local UI5 development and SAP Web IDE. It provides tools that replace the third-party tools and give you the same possibilities that comes out-of-the-box in SAP Web IDE.

UI5 Tooling is the key enabler to free your developers. Developers can choose for SAP Web IDE or any other local IDE. They will have all tools in any IDE to create their UI5 app.

SAP Web IDE is great, especially for beginners, but experienced UI5 developers will prefer their local IDE. Local IDE’s, like VSCode, also offer a nice Development eXperience.

You'll notice that switching to another IDE, requires a lot of configuration that comes out of the box in SAP Web IDE. In this session, I want to share how you can start using the UI5 Tooling starting from an existing UI5 app developed in SAP Web IDE. In the end, you'll have the same features as in SAP Web IDE and even more.







 

UI5 TOOLING EXTENSIBILITY + CAP + TESTING = NICE


vobu


As I mentioned earlier, I did not attend Wouter his session, but I did have the honor to be Track Host in Demo Room 3 where I could attend and introduce Volker Buzek. Volker’s session enlightened me in a way that I now know the formula for producing a NICE Application.

I take some UI5 tooling put on a CAP and I start testing. I mix it up in a nice way and I have a NICE Application!

No really, thanks a lot Volker. I had some questions in the CAP usage and I didn’t even have to ask. With your live demos, tips and tricks you just handed over all the answers to my questions.

Here is a brief summary what Volker his session was about:

Taking you through a journey on extending the ui5 tooling (demoing from the ecosystem showcase https://github.com/petermuessig/ui5-ecosystem-showcase), how to combine it with the Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP, Node.js flavor), throwing in some Testing best practices (Unit, OPA, UIveri5) and demoing why this is a nice development experience.







 

SAPUI5 CONTROLS VS. UI5 WEB COMPONENTS - PRACTICAL EXPERIENCES


Fabienne Pipping, Alexander Seibel


I was attending the other Demo room again (Track Host) but the use cases for SAPUI5 controls and UI5 Web Components are more than clear from now on thanks to Fabienne Pipping, Alexander Seibel.

Here is a brief summary about their session:

Everyone is talking about UI5 Web Components and how they provide enterprise class re-usable UI elements for a broad range of web frameworks. We decided to take a deeper look and compared ‘classical’ SAPUI5 with the UI5 Web Components in a real-world example using React.js. By developing a similar looking front-end in both frameworks, we had the chance to analyses the development-process and the resulting apps under several aspects.

  • Documentation: How helpful / applicable are the different developer-documentations?

  • Scope: How many predefined controls / components are available? Is the scope sufficient for real-world scenarios?

  • Non-control-elements and flexibility: What is needed to build something I cannot represent as a control / component? Which approach provides more possibilities?

  • Performance: Measured performance using a user-centered approach with Google Lighthouse.

  • Accessibility: Are UI5 Controls and UI5 Web Components both really enterprise ready and equal? Or are there any differences that developers must take into account?

  • Other striking differences we noticed during implementation e.g. different programming models and the need of custom CSS


We would love to share our experiences with the UI5 community and give further insights into the different scenarios.







 

FAST, EASY AND RELIABLE TESTING OF UI5 APPS WITH CYPRESS


Nitish Mehta, Vaibhav Arora


The second session I could introduce was brought by our Indian friends ?? Nitish Mehta and Vaibhav Arora. To be honest I had

No idea about what Cypress was or what it could be used for. But what what I did know is that reliable tests are worth gold! Thanks to Nitish and Vaibhav I now know them both and I know how to integrate them. Also, if I look back at when they created their solution it seems they are the ancestors of the UI5 OPA-tests? ?

Here is a brief summary about their session:

We've all been guilty of skipping front-end application testing or delaying it to a point where it just feels like a lot of effort. Through this talk, we want to introduce everyone to 'cypress' and how it can make the cumbersome integration testing fun and easy. We will start from installation and then proceed to create some integration tests for one of the open-source OpenUI5 applications.







 

TYPESCRIPT WITH UI5


helmut.tammen2


For those with an interest in Typescript and those who were attending Helmut Tammen his session about Typescript with UI5, it was defiantly like being in the right place at the right. I was hosting a track in a different Demo Room but I will surely watch the session afterwards when it is online!

A brief summary about Helmut his session can be found here:

In this session I will show how to use Typescript in a real life UI5 project. I will talk about Typescript in general and why it is better than plain JavaScript. Then I will show a real-life project I realized with Typescript and UI5. In this code I will point out some specialties I had to implement and follow to leverage Typescript.







 

UI5 IN 202X


Nicolas Lunet


Unfortunately, Nicolas Lunet could not join us because of the flu, but he Could count on Peter Muessig to kick in last-minute with a nice continuation of the technical part of the Keynote. The UI5 CLI and Tooling evolution are no myths. They are out there and ready to use! One of my favorite live demos during this session? UI5 migration! Replacing old deprecate API usage and code for better performance by running a Node.js app/script. Lovely!







 

Lunch


A whole morning of having fun, learning, sharing and talking makes a Man/Woman hungry. What’s the cure? An amazing lunch for everybody! Delicious food served between 12:10 and 13:10.





 

DON'T BE SCARED FOR CAP, ODATA V4 CAN WORK IN PRODUCTION


vweiss


In the afternoon my shifts as Track host were over. It was about time to set foot in the Demo Room 2. Here I enjoyed a session by Vincent Weiss with only one main message: Don’t be scared for CAP. For those who didn’t know the SAP CAP Bookshop demo yet, this was a good get started session. Those who did know it already were shared some nice tips, tricks and experiences.







 

LESSONS LEARNED OF WORKING WITH COMPONENTS AND COMPOSITE CONTROLS


panneels.robin


I knew that at a certain time, things would be different, and I would miss a session in Demo Room 3 too. While I was attending the session in Demo Room 2, Robin shared his lessons learned while working with Components and Composite Controls.

A brief summary about Robin his session can be found here:

During this session we are going to explore UI5 Components and Composite Controls and the combination of the two. We will go deeper in the lessons learned we've had from working with them.







 

FIORI AT SCALE TOOLING THAT CUTS DEPLOYMENT TIME


grzegorz.malewski


In this world time is everything. One hour is gone before you know it. We only have 24 of them and we want to spend them as productive as possible. Since we have 24 of them and we must make some choices sometimes, I was not able to attend Greg his session. But I can tell you guys I would be glad to spend one of the 24 I have, at watching the video afterwards. Because really, it sounds like an interesting topic.

A brief summary about Greg his session can be found here:

Many SAP S/4 HANA project management offices and UX design leads struggle with the best way to document the applications that the project team sets in the course of implementation. Projects often use complex Excel spreadsheets to track the standard and custom apps in scope, an approach that is both labor-intensive and subject to errors. This was precisely the challenge that the team I worked with faced one year back, on S/4 HANA implementation. Together with other Fiori Tracker developers, we decided to prepare the SAP Fiori application that addressed this challenge. The presentation will cover the main features of the tool we have developed.







 

CONSUME UI5 WEB APPS FROM THE HTML APPLICATION REPOSITORY


mariusobert


Since Cloud Foundry and the concept of the Approuter is a really hot topic now these days, it evolves very fast and sometimes can be hard to catch up or even to stay up to date. That’s why I was really looking forward to Marius his session. This to get an up to date brief introduction again and to get a good overview on what’s “old and deprecated” and what’s the “new, good and correct way” to go now these days. Time to keep up with the new approach.

A brief summary about Marius his session can be found here:

While the development of the OpenUI5 technology advances with incredible speed, one thing remained almost constant for a very while time: The deployment flow of the web app to the Cloud Foundry environment. For years, we embedded the minified UI project as a static resource in the Approuter module. While this approach works fine in simple scenarios, it might reach its limits when the application needs to scale. In this session, I will explain the disadvantages of the old approach and how to overcome them with the HTML5 Application Repository service.







 

DEVELOP CUSTOM UI5 LIBRARIES IN SAP WEB IDE


thomas.nelissen


At Flexso Digital we put a lot of effort in knowledge sharing. But still it is impossible to share everything we do. But again, an advantage of attending events. This way I was able attend my colleague Thomas his session on developing custom SAPUI5 libraries and how to use them in your applications. Seems like the WebIDE has some cool “hidden” features for some developers among us. Thomas found out and shared it all with us. Thanks Thomas!







 

BOOST YOUR UI5 APPS WITH SERVER-SIDE RENDERING


Nitish Mehta, Vaibhav Arora


Since I chose to attend my colleague Thomas his session, I missed Nitish and Vaibhav their session about Server-side rendering. Unfortunately. I will defiantly watch it afterwards guys! Seems super cool!

Here is a brief summary about their session:

Ever wondered how to speed up your application's initial load time or create SEO-optimized webpages within the paradigm of UI5? Well, we did the same. In this lightning talk, we cover how you can boost your UI5 application's perceived performance by leveraging server-side rendering powered by puppeteer and NodeJS.







 

PLUGIN SHOWCASE


tom.vandoorslaer  c3d1947136cd4c748a7aa794001af496


As I mentioned in the introduction, I attended my first SAP UI5con Belgium 2020 event as an attendee and speaker. Unfortunately, my session took place at the same time as Tom’s and Wouter’s session about their plugin showcase. As they mention plugins in the Fiori Launchpad are an underestimated feature. I have to admit because I only hear about them a few times. This makes you guys session the next one on my list to watch afterwards!

Here is a brief summary about their session:

A hugely underestimated feature of the Fiori launchpad, is the ability to create plugins that are available from the header, always. We've already created multiple plugins to make our day to day life easier, and we know that there are others available in GitHub repo's all around. What is missing is a tool to easily test such plugins, with a local launchpad. This is what we want to present to you: A local launchpad that automatically bundles freely available plugins and makes it easy to try them out.







 

CREATE SAPUI5 APPLICATIONS WITH GOOGLE FIREBASE


vvdries


The last session of the day, presented me myself and I. How did I experience it? Well stress nowhere to be found. Why is that? These SAP events whether it is an Inside Track event, TechEd, UI5con event, you are among friends. Colleague developers you can learn from and they from you. I brought my session and when I have a look at the feedback it seems that enthusiasm was something I had plenty of. ?

One tip to myself speak slower. According the feedback it was brought in a detailed and clear way which probably covered the fast speaking part. Time to learn from it. If you attended my sessions or watched the live stream and have some tips or tricks for my next presentation please share them. I would love to hear from you guys!

What did I present? I provided a brief introduction to Google Firebase and on how to use the Firebase Cloud Firestore to create real-time UI5 applications.

You can find my presentation and the GitHub project right here in my repository:

GitHub Project: https://github.com/vvdries/SAP-Firebase-Connect

PowerPoint on GitHub: https://github.com/vvdries/SAP-Firebase-Connect/blob/master/2020_UI5con_Belgium_CREATE_SAP_UI5_APPLI...



A brief summary about Dries his session can be found here:

Integrate Firebase into your SAPUI5 Applications. Use the Firebase Cloud Firestore Database as a back-end, together with the SAPUI5 Framework to create a Real-time Web Applications.











 

THANKS AND SEE YOU ...


nicolasgoris


After such an amazing event there is a big need for a nice wrap-up. Who would do it better than our own colleague Nicolas Goris? A beautiful recap for a beautiful and amazing event! This together with

Some awesome stats:

60 attendees ?

2 tracks ?️

7 sessions ?‍?

6 people from SAP ?

7 different countries ? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??

60 people on the waiting list ?

Keynote by SAP SE ?

More UI5conBE stickers than a human being can handle ?️



If going home with a lot of fun and knowledge would not be enough. Of course not! The speakers went home with a bottle of Flexso DigitAle, brewed by the Flexso Digital team itself! With big thanks to joachim.vanpraet !



Also, the attendees received a nice goodies bag on their way out.

Maybe one more stat can be added… we love taking pictures, because hey we are good at it too don’t you think? ?





Even selfies! ? Thanks to ann.koolen  our very own Flexso Digital selfie specialist!



 

16:40    EVENING EVENT - Everyone


What do we do after such a long but amazing day? We have a drink, chat, laugh and have even more fun! That’s why the evening event description is not lying. ?

Join us for our cozy evening event happening in the Customer Experience Center to discuss and chill after this exciting day. There’ll be food and drinks and most importantly: load of fellow devs to get to know!

 

Overall impression?


Like every SAP event, an event full of friends, knew people to meet and a way to learn and share experience in a fun and cool way. I’m really happy I could be a part of this and I’m really looking forward to the next edition. Maybe and hopefully I can make it to the SAP UI5con Walldorf event too!

Thanks to SAP, UI5, Flexso, Flexso Digital, the streaming team, the catering and everyone else I’m forgetting here to make this event such an epic and amazing one!

See you guys next time!

Kind regards,

Dries

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