Comment by jve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jve | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad I'm seeing some SAP post on HN frontpage. Why?

When my sister started to working at SAP working on documentation, I had to look at some of those. I noticed something like SAPUI5 and thought: hey, this looks pretty modern and nice and something that competes with Microsoft offerings! https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/#/topic/8b49fc198bf04b2d980...

Then I see them documenting/pushing people in CI/CD direction (https://help.sap.com/docs/BTP/65de2977205c403bbc107264b8eccf...) involving Docker, Kubernetes, github and stuff like that. Pretty modern.

I went onto HN to learn how people feel about the development tools they provide and found... nothing. I was like: what? How can they have slick documentation, processes, tools, frameworks, cloud offerings, database (SAP HANA?). So basically I thought - so much competitiveness for Microsoft there. How come HNers don't mention this? What are the people working with this tech? Germans mostly or what? But navigating their documentation, tutorials feels something that could be evaluated as a modern development platform.

For all the documentation you see surrounding SAPUI5, it is very incomplete when you have to actually use it do develop something.

It is built on top of jQuery and extremely slow. They are very adamant on MVC with two-way databinding (the opposite of React or most other frontend libraries that have been around for almost 10 years). The backend request is geared toward OData (think graphql but table-oriented), and adding logic between the UI and the OData endpoint is hard.

SAPUI5 is hard to use even for a mediocre screen need. It aims to get the simple apps really simple to write (to lower development cost), but at that it kills the productivity of all the other apps.

Getting back to documentation, after your app is not just some components living in logical islands but have to interact with one another (think getting data from one place to drive another component) most of the time the documentation did not help with that, and I had to resort to debug the whole library internally to understand it.

Add all that to the fact that they don’t even care to support firefox for non-windows users bah

It is really understandable why no one but SAP uses this library. It was made for one use case by sap for sap and that’s it.

slow is putting it very polite

Thanks for feedback. Exactly what I was searching for on HN - people with some experience there that have felt the real roadblocks.

> Add all that to the fact that they don’t even care to support firefox for non-windows users bah

Might not have official support, but personally I've never had problems with Firefox on Mac using UI5.

I currently work on a UI5-app at SAP and even though we don't use odata, I honestly don't find the process of developing it all that unpleasant. I found it really quite easy to onboard (being productive within like 2 weeks), though it may have helped me that I didn't really have much relevant frontend experience beforehand.

Some decently cool stuff is happening behind the scenes though. I believe they're working on getting rid of the jQuery dependency, and typescript support is also coming (though still somewhat in its infancy).

I will agree that it's pretty slow though, and very heavy as frameworks go. You can do a good bit to make it quicker, but it will never win any speed awards in its current form.

SAP targets ERP, and basically nothing else. You will never[1] see SAP HANA used outside of a SAP deployment, even though it is a general purpose in-memory database with some nice features. Similarly, you never see SAP ABAP used outside of a SAP deployment.

Microsoft targets the most generic use-cases possible, even more so than, say, Linux. You can do anything[2] with Windows, SQL Server, ASP.NET, Azure, etc...

[1] For some values of never. [2] For some values of anything.

It's an interesting observation. SAP has opened up some of their offerings (like OpenUI5) but there's been very little buy-in. Perhaps it's also partly due to the earlier comments from then-SAP CTO Shai Agassi claiming that open source stimulates innovation? Maybe it's because the products aren't great (I'm no fan of UI5).

FWIW, I'm a massive HANA skeptic - I think it's overpriced and SAP betting the farm on it a few years ago wasn't necessarily the best option. It's a product that was put together from various disparate components - TREX, P*TIME (from Transact in Memory), etc - and that shows. It hangs together like something made of brown paper and string, with so many tuneables it puts Oracle to shame.

I have 'one' exception to that. I worked with a medical data analysis company that had implemented SAP HANA as a data warehouse/analysis platform for tons of treatment records.

My task was replacing it with Spark/S3 :P

My current workplace has implemented a custom SAP HANA-based solution for forecasting (code is written in a mixture of Python and R). I wasn't involved in the project but I'm not convinced it couldn't have been architected completely differently - perhaps a suite of microservices running on K8S with a PostgreSQL backend. Having an in-memory database licensed by RAM usage quickly gets mother-f'ing expensive as Nathan Fielder would say.

Suburban Philadelphia has a very large SAP office with a lot of developers. The ones I've spoken to are a normal mix for enterprise places of good and bad developers but they mostly speak positively of it.

Slick? UI5? Are we seeing the same thing?

UI5 is a travesty. It is a complete disaster, and if I somehow ended up working on it, I would not put that experience on my resume out of shame.

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