Hi all,
we would like to share important news although one or the other might have already realized them.
OpenUI5
Since last Friday, we have enabled code contributions to OpenUI5. First of all, this obviously gives you the option to contribute to and improve OpenUI5 as well as SAPUI5. So if something is not as expected, you can do more than just asking for help. You now might become active and suggest the appropriate coding that you think will solve the issue or improves the behavior. Besides that, the technical enablement of the open source build has influenced the way how SAPUI5 and OpenUI5 are structured respectively which build tools are used. You can now also e.g. use the build-free development mode based on Node and Grunt as described here https://github.com/SAP/openui5/blob/master/docs/developing.md. This gives you and us additional faster development round trips when developing controls or control extensions to SAPUI5/OpenUI5.
The other aspect that you should consider is the option to find or ask for information not only within the SCN community, but also on stackoverflow using the tags “sapui5” or the search term “openui5”. The appropriate search string is http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/sapui5%20or%20openui5. By implication, when asking a question in stackoverflow the tag to be used is “sapui5”.
You can find more details on http://openui5.org/ .
Transparency
Along with the decision to allow code contributions, we have changed the way how our developers work internally. Looking into openui5 on github, you can see the activities of our developers on a very fine granular basis. Basically every commit to one of the open sourced areas of SAPUI5 is directly visible in OpenUI5 as well. This obviously gives you the information on our current priorities but maybe even more importantly, the ability to test with kind of ß-versions before we officially release the software. If many of you would do this, this will help you to avoid surprises when installing the SAP support packages later on and obviously it would help us to realize and fix issues before releasing the software. As of today, you can assemble your own package using the new build infrastructure, but we’ll also provide pre-packaged archives along internal milestones in the future.
Roadmap handling
As mentioned beforehand, there is already complete transparency based on the fine granular commit messages. However, it is maybe not so easy to decrypt these fine granular messages when being interested in the high level picture. Thus along the tradition of open source projects, we have decided to try to make the product roadmap more transparent so that consumers and potential contributors have this information at hand when planning consumption or code contributions. This will be quite detailed for the next 4 weeks and as detailed as possible for the next release or releases. This information will reflect the internal planning, so please accept that it is not a commitment as there might be problems during execution or there might be changes in priorities/plans. In both cases, the roadmap would be adjusted so that you as soon as possible get a clear picture again.
So please discover your new options, provide us with feedback and stay tuned with regard to the roadmap that is going to come soon.
Best regards
Stefan
