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Former Member

In this blog, I would like to share some of my experience in developing and working with HTML5 Mobile Web Apps using Business Server Pages (BSP).  This is mostly based on a recent project I worked on, in which our team had the requirement to develop a custom mobile app for one of our sales reporting solutions (Automated Deal Roadmap) running on BW 7.30 powered by HANA.

For more information about the ADRM project and architecture, please take a look at a great blog from Matthias wild:

http://scn.sap.com/community/data-warehousing/netweaver-bw/blog/2011/10/02/how-does-analytics-look-l...

Hopefully, I will be able to provide a couple of helpful tips and a nice alternative to a native iOS app. Depending on the response of this blog, I will post a follow up to provide a step-by-step example of putting all the pieces together.

Lately, HTML5 has been making a lot of headway in the mobile scene, especially since it poses the very attractive notion that you can target all platforms with a single development. In fact, there are several open source libraries out there like Zepto and XUI that help you get started with this right out the box.

For our project, we went with JQuery Mobile.  JQuery Mobile provides a complete generic framework for developing sophisticated HTML5 mobile web apps, and at the same time, saves the developer the trouble of having to write platform specific code (JavaScript & CSS).

If you’re interested in learning more about JQuery Mobile, you can visit their site and take a look at the “Quick start guide”. From there, you will find all the information you need in order to quickly understand what resources are needed and how to get up and running with this amazing framework.

http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.1.0/docs/about/getting-started.html

Let’s face it; there’s way more people out there who know JavaScript and HTML/HTML5 compared to Objective-C (programming language for the iOS/OS platform).  Also, if you’re reading this blog, chances are very strong that you’re already a pro at working with ABAP Objects. If not, don’t worry; ABAP is not at all complicated. The following link will give you a good overview of ABAP objects and also provide you with a number of other resources to get started:

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/ABAP/ABAP+Objects

On the other hand, if you’ve already worked with ABAP, than you’re probably already familiar with Business Server Pages (BSP), which is a page-based programming model with server-side scripting as well as server page technology for developing Web Applications using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet).  This means not only can you use the BSP framework to include all the necessary JQuery Mobile resources (JavaScript and CSS files), but In my follow up blog, I will show you how you can use it to create your service layer to retrieve data from your ABAP system in JSON or XML format. Also in the follow up blog, I will demonstrate how you can easily consume your services in JavaScript using the JQuery Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) library.

Although BSP technology has been around for quite a while, it offers so much flexibility to accomplish a wide variety of different tasks. It seems like every time I get the feeling that I’ve reached a dead-end in a project, I can always count on BSP to get me out of the jam. For more information about Business Server Pages, including information on where to find sample applications in your system, visit the following link:

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/index?rid=/webcontent/uuid/8020ca24-b0f7-2c10-1aa8-94f052f54316

Finally, I hope I was able to provide some helpful information for people contemplating the idea of building a mobile app, but who would like to leverage their existing knowledge base in ABAP and, most of all, their existing SAP system landscape. Like I said, depending on the response, I would really like to post a follow up to give you an easy step-by-step on how to put all the pieces together.

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