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0 pointspsidium3y ago0 comments

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.

0 comments

levital3y ago

> 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.

jve3y ago

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

6565656565653y ago

slow is putting it very polite

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