SAPUI5 is a JavaScript based UI development toolkit for HTML5. SAPUI5 version 1.4.0 is a release now usable for external shipments. I recently got a chance to play around with it a little. Here are my quick take away's.
- Built on the strong foundation of JQuery (JQuery 1.7.1)
- JQuery is the most popular (and IMO, the strongest) JavaScript toolkit today. It offers great, yet simplified features for DOM traversing, event handling, Ajax interactions, etc.
- Cool collection of UI Widgets
- In my opinion, JQuery lagged in it's offerings of inbuilt UI Widgets. Today JQuery has UI Widgets like Accordion, Autocomplete, Button, Datepicker, Dialog, Progress bar, Slider, Tabs (and I think, that's it).
- Apart from these SAPUI5 offers a rich collection of UI Widgets like - Form Fields, Menu, Message Box, Paginator, Rich Tooltip, Search Field, Roadmap, Tree,... This list just goes on and on.
- Extensible - Being a pure JavaScript toolkit allows us to -
- Include your own JavaScript, HTML and CSS in UI5 pages
- Include other JavaScript libraries
- Create composite controls from existing UI5 controls
- Custom Controls from scratch
- SAP Product Standards compliant
- Write once, run everywhere (in supported browsers) - Cross browser support
- We don't have to write browser specific code which has been a major problem till some time back. SAPUI5 (+ JQuery) handles all these problems internally providing us really simple and neat wrapper APIs.
- Zero footprint - No browser plug-ins required
- Being a pure JavaScript toolkit, SAPUI5 will run on all browsers and in all devices (including mobile) that have browsers without requiring
- HTML5
- Uses a lot of CSS3 features
- Web storage for personalization of tables
- IDE Support - Eclipse
- Application development tools in Eclipse
- Custom Control development tools in Eclipse
- Others (which I couldn't test yet)
- OData Support
- UI5 Theming
- Localization
- Resource Handler
Getting Started? - http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/index?rid=/webcontent/uuid/20a34ae7-762d-2f10-c994-db2e898d5f70