SAP Web IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for SAP Fiori and SAPUI5 Applications

SAP Web IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a Web-based development environment designed to support the end-to-end application lifecycle for SAP Fiori and SAPUI5 applications

In today’s market scenario, the key to business success lies in agility in multiple dimensions. One of the key aspects of agility is to design, develop and deploy applications swiftly to address the growing expectations of the users to have amazing user experiences. Using SAP Web IDE, developers and power users alike can swiftly deploy new-age applications that leverage SAP HANA and SAP HANA cloud platform and is planned to be available as on-premise solution on SAP HANA XS in the future. The pluggable and modular architecture allows to integrate SAPUI5 tools and enables SAP development, partners and customers to add their own plugins.

This web based development environment addresses the application development processes in a comprehensive manner, right from prototype through deployment. SAP Web IDE offers highly efficient tools to easily build and extend apps applying SAP Fiori UX and generic SAPUI5 apps using wizards, templates, drag and drop tools, code editor and much more. Simply stated, SAP Web IDE is a web based environment that lets users to create incredible user experiences swiftly for browser and mobile devices. Apart from that, SAP Web IDE environment also lets users to extend SAP Fiori and UI5 apps (through visual extensibility editor) as well as build new UI5/HTML5 or custom Fiori apps.

Overview of key features

• Offers standard development tools such as code editors wizards and WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) tooling that are optimized for building responsive HTML5 apps with SAPUI5.
• Consists of certain standard templates – SAPUI5, Fiori and SAP WEB IDE plugin; and offers flexibility to create your own template (custom template).
• Supports the E2E application life cycle that covers UI design, development, testing, deployment and customer extensions for responsive SAPUI5 apps.
• Code based environment – the tool never gets in the way of the developer.
• Both SAP and non-SAP developers can design, build, test and deploy responsive SAP UI5 and Fiori like apps using SAP HANA or Gateway OData services.
• Develop once and deploy anywhere – can be run on any device including mobile and tablet.
• Instant preview feature that lets you launch the application in the browser at different resolutions and in multiple languages, using real or mock data.
• Collaborative development and project persistency that lets developers to collaborate on specific files via JAM integration (not available in the beta release in June 2014).
• Provides extensible and modular architecture that lets you add your own plug-in/template via wizards and templates.

Why SAP Web IDE

• Enhances development productivity – offers easy to consume development environment.
• Minimizes IT infrastructure and administration efforts.
• Cloud based (hosted on SAP HANA cloud platform), eliminating initial installation and configuration of local IT infrastructure.
• Access development projects anytime and anywhere.
• Holistic development environment with incredible UI.
• Drag-and-drop (WYSIWYG) editors – simple to use with less technical complexity.
• Tighter collaboration between developers, business experts and designers.

Summary

SAP Web IDE serves as a great productivity tool for developers, designers and business experts. With its cutting edge embedded tools covering end-to-end development process, it enables you to rapidly design, build and deploy web applications based on SAPUI5 and also supports you in extending SAP Fiori apps. Some of the key advantages of leveraging SAP Web IDE include enhancement of the development productivity, low infrastructure costs and ensuring tight collaboration between designers, developers and business experts. Hence, SAP Web IDE lets you develop and deploy applications with greater agility, while providing amazing end user experiences.

If you would like to request a demo for the “SAP Web IDE”, please click on the link above. Alternatively, if you would like to discuss with an Innovapptive solution expert, you can reach out to us by emailing us at sales@innovapptive.com or you can reach a sales representative at (713) 275-1804.

Enterprise Mobile App Deployment Strategies

The advent of smartphones and tablets have changed the way we interface with enterprise systems. Smartphones have redefined the way we communicate with added features like GPS, camera, scanners and much more. This is also driving changes in the way business processes are implemented within organizations. Hence, it is evident that mobile technology has a major role to play within most organizations, as remote access to enterprise systems becomes an absolute necessity with accessibility of relevant applications as and when needed. Enterprises are embracing newer technologies in this area including the best options to implement an enterprise app deployment strategy.  This blog tries to explore some the current enterprise mobile app deployment strategies.

As is generally evident, smartphone users have a shorter attention span compared to users of desktop applications and often require access, when they need most or when time is the priority. Tablets to certain extent offer more scope for data input and processing, and also has an added advantage of portability. Hence, when designing applications, one has to take into consideration certain factors like the nature of the gadget for which the application has to be designed, how data is being viewed, duration of usage and the levels of user interaction.

However, one of the greatest challenges for developing mobile applications is the myriad number of varied smartphones and tablets that need to be supported. There are several things to consider when you intend to create user interfaces for different mobile device types – designing UI for non-touch screens is quite different when compared to designing a UI for touch screens.  One interface type may not be compatible with the technical requirements of all device types.

Now, let’s understand some of the industry’s best deployment approaches.  There are currently four deployment options for mobile applications:

• Native
• Hybrid (native code with HTML and JavaScript)
• Web (HTML 5 and JavaScript)
• Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) as middleware

NATIVE DEPLOYMENT

Native deployment has certain basic advantages such as providing a more appropriate look and feel to the user and allowing usage of I/O devices within the mobile devices. This approach tends for easy adoption. However, one of the challenge is the knowledge and support for at least four client languages in order to accomplish native deployment for multiple device types (For instance, for Android devices, you need the support of J2SE, which is again incompatible with iOS and Blackberry). To make matters worse, there are different versions of these languages and newer ones are continually being released. Hence, this approach entitles possession of multiple skill sets and the ability to meet the challenge of maintaining them.

HYBRID DEPLOYMENT

This deployment integrates a native application container with an HTML5 front end. However, the user interface is displayed using an embedded HTML5 standard web browser control. This model lets developers to enjoy the benefits of using the HTML5-standard in the front-end, while retaining the power and flexibility of a native application container. However, this approach is plagued with few challenges – requires a specialized skill set and there are unresolved security related issues with the usage of HTML5.

WEB (HTML5) DEPLOYMENT

Though HTML5 provides an advantage to achieve multi-purpose web application development, however, it is just a non-enterprise grade and immature standard and not considered as a de facto standard currently. Since World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) hasn’t finalized the definition of the HTML5, it is still not valid and reliable. When it comes to the issue of securely connecting to the enterprise systems, certain vulnerabilities associated with HTML like phishing, malware and denial of service are still applicable.

MOBILE ENTERPRISE APPLICATION PLATFORM (MEAP) AS MIDDLEWARE

These platforms offers high level of flexibility in mitigating challenges of developing mobile applications by managing the diversity of devices, networks and user groups at the time of deployment and throughout the entire solution’s lifecycle.  With the provision of high level languages, it enables rapid mobile application development. MEAPs provides a comprehensive and a long term approach in deploying mobile enterprise applications, particularly when cross-platform connectivity becomes paramount. MEAPs lets you develop mobile enterprise applications once and allows you deploy it to varied mobile device types.

It consists of two components: middleware integration server and a mobile client server. The middleware component lets you integrate with the organization’s applications, taking care of cross-platform support and security. On the other hand, the mobile client server enables rapid development and deployment of the mobile presentation layer across varied device types.

In addition to the above deployment strategies, there are a few specialized packages, which provide connectivity to some or most mobile devices. These systems consist of a front-end studio that lets developers create presentation layers as required on the mobile devices, thus eliminating the requirement to create for each device type.  This is an emerging market, but looks promising.

Though there are several approaches for deploying mobile applications, developing a specific native language is a practical option for specialized workflows that involves connectivity between a specific application and a specific device type. Specialized packages can also be a good option, but requires full scale integration with specific enterprise applications.  However, for organizations which consists of cross-platform applications that access multiple device types, MEAPs can be the most effective and productive option.

From an organization’s perspective, you need to clearly understand your users’ needs, technologies and the resources (money and people) that you intend to invest, before you embark on the right deployment strategy.

Enterprises are looking at how to leverage mobile to transform their customer relationships, partner enablement and empower workforces. Just as the web became a strategic part of your business a decade ago, mobile will become strategic part of your business tomorrow. Innovapptive offers several solutions to help initiate your mobile journey -

mPower™ Mobile Kickstart Strategy Workshop

Take this deep dive into your company’s 1-3 year strategic mobility plans. Our mobile experts will walk you through a competitive assessment to help you understand your current position in mobile, then lead you through a 3-step process to create a mobile application strategy and provide actionable advice on your future mobile plans. At the end of this workshop your team will have a blueprint for successful mobile app design, development, test, and support.

• 2-days; Business unit, IT managers, chief marketing and mobility officers, and their teams
• Create a roadmap to scale and measure your mobile initiatives
• Determine the right mix of sourcing, development, and budget for your current ad future mobile requirements

mPower™ Starter Workshop

Join this high level discussion about the transformative nature of mobility and mobile applications on the business process. Included is a brief competitive assessment, opportunity discovery, and adjacent industry examples. We will discuss both internally-focused (employee) applications and externally-focused (customer) applications.

• ½ day; C-level executives and their teams
• Maximize the impact of mobile on your business
• Tap into Innovapptive’s mobile experts to plan your mobile strategy and prioritize your mobile investments
• Understand how to use mobile to transform your customer and partner relationships and mobilize your workforce

If you would like more information on how Innovapptive can assist you with the right mobile strategy, please clickhere to schedule an appointment with one of our solution engineers.

Android Lollipop for SAP: Innovapptive is Delivering Apps on the Next Era of Android

In an era of rapid communication through mobile and hand held devices, Android has forged one step further to come out with the latest version of its operating system – Android 5.0 Lollipop. This release comes with new features for users as well thousands of new APIs for developers. It offers level of extensibility – from phones, tablets and wearable to TVs and cars. Innovapptive will be releasing it’s first apps on Android Lollipop for SAP in Q1 of 2015.

This blog tries to addresses some of the core features of the Android Lollipop without getting into detailed technicalities.

Some of the core features of Android 5.0 Lollipop are:

• Material design
• Performance focus
• Notifications
• Support for TV
• Document-centric apps
• Advanced connectivity
• High-performance graphics
• Enhanced audio capabilities
• Enhanced camera & video
• Android in the workplace
• Screen capturing and sharing
• Advanced sensors

MATERIAL DESIGN

Android 5.0 offers material design to Android and provides you a comprehensive toolkit for integrating the new design patterns easily in your apps. The built-in activity transitions lets you seamlessly migrate from one state to another with beautiful animated motion. Buttons, checkboxes and other touch controls in your app have been configured to support ripple animations. With RenderThread (a new system managed processing thread), you can render smooth animations, even where there are delays in main UI thread.

PERFORMANCE FOCUS

Android 5.0 enhances computing experience (faster, smoother and powerful) greatly utilizing its new ART runtime to support a combination of ahead-of-time (AOT), just-in-time (JIT), and interpreted code. It is supported on ARM, x86, and MIPS architectures and is fully 64-bit compatible.

With assurance of smoother performance, Android 5.0 offers enhanced A/V sync, wherein the audio and graphics pipelines have been incorporated for more accurate time stamps, letting video apps and games to display smooth synchronized content.

NOTIFICATIONS

Notifications in Android 5.0 ensures high level of visibility, accessibility and configuration capabilities. You can enable varying notification details on the lock screen and also have the flexibility to allow none, some or all notification details to be displayed on a secured lock screen. Important notification alerts such as incoming calls are displayed in a heads-up notification – a small floating window to help you in responding or cancelling notifications without leaving your current app.

COMPLETE TV PLATFORM

A unique feature that is added in this version is the provision of a complete TV platform to enhance your app’s big screen experience. This lets users to discover content easily offering personalized recommendations and voice search. Simply stated, you can now recreate big and bold experiences for your app or game content and support interactions with game controllers and other input devices. Android provides a lensback UI framework in the v17 support library to help you develop 10-foot UIs for television.

DOCUMENT-CENTRIC APPS

Android 5.0 offers an all new Overview space (previously called Recents), which is more versatile and enables multitasking. Now APIs lets you display separate activities in your app as individual documents along with other recent screens.

You can leverage concurrent documents to allow users to instantly access more of your content or services. For instance, you might use concurrent documents to represent files in any productivity app or chats in a messaging app.

ADVANCED CONNECTIVITY

Android 5.0 adds new APIs that lets apps to execute concurrent operations with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This enables both scanning (central mode) and advertising (peripheral mode).

High-performance graphics

With support for Khronos OpenGL ES 3.1, it now provides games and other apps with the highest possible performance for both 2D and 3D graphics on all compatible devices.

ENHANCED AUDIO CAPABILITIES

With a new audio-capture design, it offers low latency audio output. This new design consists of a host of features that includes fast capture thread that prevents blocking, except during a read operation, fast track capture clients at native sample rate and channel count & bit depth.

ENHANCED CAMERA & VIDEO

Android 5.0 comes with a powerful camera APIs that enables you to capture raw formats such as YUV and Bayer RAW and manage parameters such as exposure time, ISO sensitivity and frame duration on a per-frame basis. This new camera enables you to capture uncompressed full resolution YUV images at 30 FPS on all compatible devices.

ANDROID IN THE WORKPLACE

To enable bring-your-own-device (BYOD) for enterprise environments, a new managed provisioning process has been provided that creates a secure work profile on the device.
For company-owned devices, IT administrators can commence with a new device and configure it with a device owner. Employers can then offer these devices with a device owner app already installed that enables configuration of global service settings.

SCREEN CAPTURING AND SHARING

With this new version, you can add screen capturing and screen sharing functionalities to your app. Once you have the user permission, you can capture non-secure video from the display and send it over the network, based on your requirements.

ADVANCED SENSORS

In this new version, a new tilt detector sensor lets you improve activity recognition on compatible devices and a heart rate sensor helps in capturing the heart rate of the person, who accesses the device. Enhanced interaction composite sensors are now available to detect special interactions like wake up gesture, a pick up gesture and a glance gesture.

We have just now looked into the core features of this new version and how this new version would greatly enhance the overall user experience in terms of processing speed, ease of accessing applications, user productivity, enhanced audio and video capabilities, without compromising on the security aspects.

Contact us today to learn how you can leverage our custom mobile development accelerators to convert your enterprise apps to Android 5.0 Lollipop. Read more here – Custom Application Development. Contact us by sending an email to sales@innovapptive.com

Innovapptive Partners with SAP to Deliver Top Quality Enterprise Mobile Products – The mPower™ Apps Suite & Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS)

Innovapptive Inc. is a leading SAP certified mobile application development and services partner, with global reach. The company provides end-to-end SAP mobile solutions through a wide range of pre-packaged enterprise mobile products and flexible and agile delivery models. Innovapptive’s core product offering is the mPower™ AppSuite and it’s partnership with SAP to ensure all pre-packaged mobile apps complete a rigorous SAP certification process. The SAP certification process allows Innovapptive to deliver products of top quality, trust and assurance and our collaboration success story was featured by SAP. The certification has made it easy for Innovapptive to support market-leading solutions from SAP and offer integrated solutions to its customers.

Click here and Read the detailed article on how Innovapptive and SAP are partnering together to deliver a suite of top quality pre-packaged mobile applications.

Why is SAP Certification important to Innovapptive?

Certification supports services around third-party software integration into SAP, which helps Innovapptive to aim at their top strategic objectives to empower people anywhere and anytime with simple and real time access to information and processes. With a certificate of assurance of quality from SAP, deploying developed products and managing customers are easier. Successfully engaging in the certification process offered by an enterprise mobility leader such as SAP helps Innovapptive validate internal best-practice and quality standards.

Innovapptive SAP Partnership

Benefits of Certification to Our Customers

Increased trustworthiness of customers as the SAP certified products provide a seal of trust and assurance to deploy our mPower™ Apps Suite.

Through long–term strategic planning in co-relation with SAP, Innovapptive is well positioned to delivery top quality enterprise mobile products and services to our customer base.

Innovapptive not only certifies its mPower Apps Suite with SAP, but also certifies its proprietary tools, accelerators and rapid deployment methodologies with SAP. The unique combination of certified enterprise mobile products and services from SAP helps Innovapptive delivery high value business outcomes for our customers. SAP Integration and Certification Center has helped drive higher customer adoption of both Innovapptive products and services and has enhanced credibility as a leader of enterprise mobility solutions.

Innovapptive’s 2014 Outlook with SAP

Innovapptive is aiming at strengthening quality standards and integration of functionality of our entire mPower™ Apps Suite.. Innovapptive currently has over ten mobile apps certified by SAP and is focused on certifying an additional twenty mobile apps in 2014, making Innovapptive a distinguished SAP partner with the highest number of certified mobile apps in the SAP store. Innovapptive, in 2014, strives to continually make a distinguished presence at the SAP store, making remarkable change in capturing potential customers, who opt for the quality certified apps. With a clear road map, gigantic support, certification and partnership, Innovapptive is committed to delivering high business value and accelerate our customer’s time to market with its innovations in 2014.

How to migrate app to iOS 7 using Appcelerator

Apple’s recommended steps to update your application to iOS 7. iOS 7 introduces many UI changes, such as borderless buttons, translucent bars and full-screen layout for views.

THINGS EVERY APP MUST DO:

• Update the app icon. In iOS 7, app icons for high-resolution iPhone and iPod touch are 120 x 120 pixels; for high-resolution iPad, app icons are 152 x 152 pixels. (To learn more about all icon sizes, see “Icon and Image Sizes”.) Note that iOS 7 doesn’t apply shine or a drop shadow to the app icon. And, although iOS 7 still applies a mask that rounds the corners of an app icon, it uses a different corner radius than earlier versions of iOS. See the iOS 7 Icons section below.

• Update the launch image to include the status bar area if it doesn’t already do so. This is a difference of 20 pixels in height, that is, the image is stretched 20 more pixels if you do nothing.

• Support Retina display and iPhone 5 in all your artwork and designs, if you’re not already doing so.

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.createNavigationGroup

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.NavigationGroup

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.setStatusBarStyle

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.setStatusBarHidden

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.showStatusBar

• Titanium.UI.iPhone.hideStatusBar

• Titanium.UI.setOrientationModes

How to migrate app to iOS 7 using Appcelerator ?

IOS 7 BEHAVIOR CHANGES:

Button Bar and Tabbed Bar:

On iOS 7, Apple changed the style of segmented controllers, which effects what can be customized for the Button Bar and Tabbed Bar objects in the Titanium SDK. You can no longer set the background color or style of these objects. iOS 7 only supports one style and setting the tint color.

In Release 3.1.3 and later, with iOS 7 and later, when you set the background Color property for these objects, you will be setting the tint color, and the style property is ignored. For iOS 6 and prior, the background Color and style properties still works the same since these are supported on older version of iOS.

Navigation Transitions:

On iOS 7, when transitioning between two windows in a navigation stack, the bottom window slides half way off the screen,  pauses then the top window appears. This is noticeable if you do not specify a background color for your top window, which makes it transparent. As long as you specify a background color for the top window, the application will appear to transition the same as previous iOS versions.

On iOS 6 and earlier, the bottom window would slide off screen as the top window appears on screen at the same time.

Lightweight Windows:

On iOS 7 and later, all lightweight windows, including the first root window, are displayed as full screen with a transparent status bar. Lightweight windows are windows without a navigation controller, that is, not contained in a Navigation Window or Tab Group. Any view objects added to the top of the window appear behind the transparent status bar. If your UI layout relies on the top property, you may need to readjust your layout.

You can also either set the full screen property to true to hide the status bar or set the top property to 20 to move the window below the status bar to compensate for this behavior change.

Status Bar:

In Release 3.1.3 and later, the status bar is controlled by the current window that appears on screen. By default, the status bar is displayed unless you specify the Window’s full screen property to true before opening the window. You can also control the appearance of the status bar using the Window’s status Bar Style property (new API element for Release 3.1.3). These properties can also be set on any top-level container, which include Navigation Window, Split Window and Tab Group objects.

Prior to Release 3.1.3, if you created a full screen window then opened a window without specifying the full screen property. The recently opened window would also appear full screen. In Release 3.1.3 and later, since the default value is to show the status bar, the recently opened window displays.

On iOS 7, the status bar cannot be controlled on the fly with Titanium.UI.iPhone.setStatusBarStyle, Titanium.UI.iPhone.setStatusBarHidden, Titanium.UI.iPhone.showStatusBar or Titanium.UI.iPhone.hideStatusBar. You need to either set the fullscreen property to hide the status bar or statusBarStyle to change the status bar style before opening the window. In Release 3.2.0, you can use the statusBarStyle property to change the status bar style on the fly.

iOS 7 also introduces a new light content status bar style that is exposed as the Titanium.UI.iPhone.StatusBar.LIGHT_CONTENT constant in the Titanium SDK. Use this constant to specify a status bar for use with a dark background. If you want the entire application to use this style, add the following key to your tiapp.xml file.

The following API elements are obsolete or do not work on iOS 7. These elements are deprecated in Release 3.1.3 and removed in Release 3.2.0 except the setter methods.

“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas”