SAP Web Dynpro + Adobe Flex/Flash = Enterprise UI 2.0
Thomas Jung over at SAP Developer Network has posted the details of a workshop he will be leading along with Rich Heilman, Dan McWeeney and Ed Herrmann at the SDN Community Day in Las Vagas.
The workshop is aimed at educating developers about the new UI features in the new version of Web Dynpro (SAP’s UI development technology) available in Netweaver 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1, Thomas also posted the below video that shows a preview of these new features that they will be discussing in the workshop.
All the new enhancements are exiting, but what really got me charged up was the feature called Flash Islands (mentioned around the 6th minute of the video), In summary, Web Dynpro now allows you to embed Flash/Flex components within Web Dynpro Interfaces and there is seamless integration, Web dynpro elements can communicate with Flash and Flash elements can communicate back with Web dynpro … this has 2 very exciting implications …
- Web Dynpro is a closed framework and till now could not have customized controls, now it can have any kind of UI components you can think of with Flex
- More importantly, this can totally change the face of enterprise interfaces, imagine highly interactive engaging UIs, innovative data visualizations, video etc. etc.
So dare I call this Enterprise UI 2.0 .. yeah I know 2.0 is such a cliche these days 
.. but this stuff is exciting.
August 5th, 2008
Whats the sense in integrating some unheard of thing called Web Dynpro when you can have the entire UI in Flex?
August 5th, 2008
Vikas,
Web Dynpro is SAP’s primary UI technology .. there are hundreds of millions of dollars of SAP installations in enterprises out there that use Web Dynpro as their UI
Mrinal
August 5th, 2008
What’s the envioronment like for SAP devs? I’ve never touched anything from SAP. Are developer tools free? I am sure SAP’s underpinnings are very complex, how difficult is it to become productive? Are SAP technologies fun to work with? Lively market for consultants? Where’s a good place to learn more (besides sap site)?
August 29th, 2008
This is a great post, Mrinal. I am deeply interested in the Enterprise 2.0 space, and particularly, the use of Rich UIs in enterprise applications. This is definitely a big step in the right direction. Have you had a chance to do do the seamless embedding yourself yet? I’d be curious to see what you thought of the experience.
Best,
Adil
August 29th, 2008
Adil,
I haven’t had the chance to try it out, but I saw a blog post from Rich Heilman where talks about his experience, he says…
“Basically you use a SAP delivered library in your Flex component, and call a method to register the Flex component with Web Dynpro. There are also other methods provided which handle the interaction between the Flex component and the Web Dynpro application, such as firing events back and forth. You then upload your Flex component to the Web Dynpro ABAP component, set the root container as a Flash Islands container, map the SWF, set a few context mappings to the data sources used in the Flex component, and that’s pretty much it. Ok, so maybe I’m making it sound too easy, but I was actually really surprised how easy it was to get working.”
That sounds pretty straight forward. I will share my experience as well whenever I get a chance to try it out.
I’m not surprised that smart people like you see the potential here .. I think this is huge.
September 27th, 2008
This is definitely a huge improvement for Web Dynpro as, until now, it was nearly impossible to have customized client-side components.
I guess this is because SAP wanted to still be able to address several outputs? (HTML+Javascript+CSS, Flex, smartphones [WML?] for Web Dynpro Java)
Until now, there were complicated mechanisms to achieve “Flex-integration” using suspend/resume plugs together with BSP (the other UI technology), and so on…
@mullin
SAP being an ERP editor, its solutions are really business-oriented (be it Finance, Human Ressources, Logistics or whatever). I think this is the main differentiating point compared to other big editors.
The development environment are not “state-of-the-art” (especially on the ABAP-side [ABAP is the proprietary language]) that’s why I would not call them “fun” to work with.
But Web Dynpro’s strength is that it relies on the huge business data models, functions, processes… that SAP provides and thus, allows huge productivity when building business applications at the cost of a “average user experience”.
With Flash Islands, I hope we will abe able, when it is required, to improve user experience.
January 27th, 2009
[...] going on with SAP, NetWeaver, and Flash. Netweaver 7.0 supports something called “Flash Islands” which are basically SWF files inside of Web Dynpro interfaces, which is the user interface [...]
January 27th, 2009
[...] of SAP Flash Islands I thought it was a game changing move in the SAP world and went so far as to describe it as Enterprise UI 2.0 … I’ve played a little with Flash Islands since then and I just blogged on SAP [...]