Key take aways from reCAP and UI5con 2024

This is my wrap-up and summary of UI5con 2024. UI5con was part of happened CodeConnect 2024 and with reCAP 2024 being part of it too and happening just the day before, I’ll include my notes on that event too.

General Setup

The CodeConnect events were hybrid events. Everyone not able or willing to travel to the event could attend by watching sessions online. The focus was clearly on the on-site part. The location was at SAP: ROT03 in St. Leon-Rot. Not exactly the center of the universe, but reachable. There are hotels in the neighborhood and ROT03 is reachable via public transportation from Heidelberg, Mannheim and Karlsruhe. From the train station it is a 15 minutes’ walk. For the on-site participants there was enough time for registration and to get badge– which included all food and drinks: breakfast, lunch, coffee, afternoon snacks, evening celebration. This time there were less tracks in parallel as “only” three main rooms for sessions were available (something we from the ABAPConf orga team decided early on: less is more and have two big rooms for sessions). ROT03 as an event location is good enough for hosting around 400 people. It is crowded, but never too crowded. The canteen is spacious, and the outdoor seats allow for everyone to find a silent place to talk.

All events offered a live stream for the Audimax room. For reCAP it was possible to attend the sessions in room W1/W2 via Microsoft Teams. All sessions were recorded and are – or will be – made available for on demand watching. For reCAP, you have to use the SAP Broadcasting tool, for UI5con the live stream from Audimax is available on YouTube. Personally, I like it more to have the videos on YouTube than to have to use the SAP Broadcasting tool. I do not thinkg that the Broadcasting tool is offering a good UX. Positioning the video, navigating back or forth in the stream is not so easy as it should be. Maybe SAP can collect more data there than via YouTube? In that case: good for SAP, not so good for the end user. Thank you to the UI5 team to make life easier for the online audience. Specially for watching the recordings: YouTube is just easier.

Impressions

The live streaming experience is for the online audience at event day. No stream failures, image and sound worked. For everyone participating on-site, the experience at the location is what counts. For the CodeConnect events, focus was on the on-site experience: expert talks, food, games. For me, reCAP online was nice; UI5con on-site was by far the better experience: they know how to organize an event. Needless to say: both events attracted a high number of participants. A special part of UI5con for the last years was always the evening celebration. This year this was the absolute highlight of the event.

Some sessions were packed, with people standing in the room. In others it was easier to find a seat. Sessions were offered all the time. Some were 25 minutes, other 45 minutes, the workshops 2 hours and there were the expert tables. Short: no gap or pause in the agenda. Someone was always presenting. Which meant: you were also always missing something. What else to expect at a conference with more than one track?

Sponsors were at the same floor as room W1/W2, W3 and the expert tables. While this assured that people passed by the sponsors, it also meant that it was crowded at the expert and sponsor area. It’s the same setup as last time, and still makes it hard to attend an expert talk. But it makes the sponsors happy.

What surprised me at UI5con was the number of people walking around and, well, just walking around. They either waited for another session to start or were just, well, waiting. For some there was too much time between two sessions worth attending. This is per se not bad, as the canteen was a great place to meet. No problem at all to get in contact with other participants. There were many people waiting and killing time: participants were just walking around, sitting in the canteen or at the coffee machine waiting until the next interesting session started. I, for my part, enjoyed the fact that people had “troubles” with the agenda. I gathered feedback from other participants regarding ABAPConf, FioriConf, their real-world problems and their view on UI5con.

Sessions

All sessions offered high quality content. There is always the risk to have talks that do not fit 100% or are boring, off topic, etc. Organizers only know after the talk if it worked. And then it is too late. Looking at the speakers, it was a risk averse selection. This is an area all CodeConnects events must work on: how to get more people speaking that might not be that well known.

Looking at the agenda and on-site, it became clear that both CAP and UI5 team work closely together. Not only regarding the organization. One of the sweet spots for CAP is to support the UI5 developer. Obviously CAP and UI5 (mostly Fiori Elements) was present in both conferences at least in the demo parts. Some sessions were clearly constructed to serve as a show case. That’s OK, but then there must be a reference to a real-world problem. For some content presented, there are SAP standard tools available, for others the usage scenario is too narrow. Content was a too much of the sprint review type. It is always nice to see what was done in the last months by the core developer teams. But please keep it to a minimum or put all of it into a single. Some sessions seemed to be added to fill up the agenda. For instance, let me pick some UI5con sessions which should be revised next time or even removed from the agenda.

Sessions about tooling are nice. But keep it to a minimum. UI5con offered a workshop and 4 talks about tooling. Maybe the idea was to offer a sub-track about tooling? If so, I missed this idea. In my experience, the already available tooling is not bad, but is missing adoption as many developers are not aware of what exists (hint: there is a website). Combine the 5 sessions about tooling into one for UI5 devops. Let actions speak: adjust the Fiori/UI5 templates to include these and people will start using the tools. If you start a new Fiori project in BAS using the wizard, the mock server is already added. Just ensure that the tools are added in the templates, which, btw, are under control of SAP, and you get closer to UI5 devops automatically. And the 5 sessions are condensed to a 5 minute demo at a keynote. UI5 devops brings me to the next session.

I am not a fan of survey presentations. This type of session only works in keynotes, when actions to address the findings are presented. Seeing a presentation about a survey is always a good indication of: I want to give a talk but have nothing to talk about. Here the focus of the survey was already unclear, but begging for attention. A comprehensive survey? According to whom? When I came across the survey I was already wondering: why questions regarding the past? Assume you conduct a survey and ask SAP customers: what ERP system do they use now? And then be surprised that most SAP customers are not using S/4HANA. Ask in the survey if they are in a S/4HANA project or if there is a plan to be on S/4HANA in 2035 and you get a different result. Same for testing. Ask a developer if they test their apps using QUnit, OPA5, wdi5 or none of these, and you get a high number of none. Ask now if there are some kind of tests in place, like smoke test, functional tests, manual testing or a 3^rd party tool, and you might get a different answer. Or ask: do they test their apps more than their transactions? Or ask: is the tooling too complicated? Are they aware of what is possible? There is a reason why I do not like surveys to be discussed at events. It’s just too hard to make it a valuable investment of time.

The sessions about Web Components (WC) are given at the wrong conference. It is nice to see that progress is made. But what to do with this information? What is the strategy from SAP regarding WC? When will the WC be good enough to replace entirely the UI5 controls? When will a Fiori Elements app be offer the same features using only WC? How to use the UI5 WC for Angular? How is this integrated into fundamental styles? What is the role of WC in a corporate strategy to roll out Fiori not only for SAP apps? What is the usage adoption of UI5 WC outside SAP? Present how UI5 Web Components can be used in non-SAP stacks to offer a better UX to end users. Showing however that you can use WC in UI5 apps …

Many sessions were from SAP employees. Searching on the UI5con agenda for SAP employees gives me 31 results, for reCAP I get 47 (including duplicates). Combined that’s 78 speaker slots from SAP. Add the non-SAP speakers, and it is crowded. As already mentioned: someone was always presenting. And there was already a reduction in sessions compared to last time, as the rooms W1 and W2 were merged into one. Effectively taking off one track from both agenda. Maybe extend the time slots and have at least UI5con be a two-day event in 2025? Or reCAP and UI5con get 4h extra each and have both together be a 3-day event? Or 4? As an alternative, maybe reduce the number of sessions? 69 +/- sessions in total is … stressful.

I do not think that many sessions were irreplaceable (quantity vs. quality). As said above: both events seemed like a status report of what was done by the SAP teams over the last year. Obviously, everyone wants to show what was delivered. This is perfect for nerd conferences. For internal conferences. For core developer summits. Or for the product roadmap. Should a conference not also focus on project experience? Partners are important to transport the product strategy from SAP to customers. I hoped for more customers presenting how they are using CAP and UI5. I know that UI5 is used widely at customers thanks to Fiori. Dear customers, submit sessions and present what you do! CAP is recommended for BTP development. It is hyped and marketed by SAP. Either this hype is not making it through to customers, or there are many projects close to go live. Maybe next year customers are showing in large number how they use CAP to run their business.

What is the value of sessions that talk about technical aspects that are nice to know, but the framework solves for me? What is the idea of having this kind of content? Let the audience learn about bad practices? By making it look like best practice? Is the goal to show how to develop apps at customers that make the consultant irreplaceable? This is dangerous and is not what at least I expect to see at SAP events. Does this now mean that the presentations were bad? No, not all. I am missing balance between nerd stuff and what helps people when they get back to their office. Some sessions were in the wrong conference. These should be presented at other tech conferences, to a non-SAP audience. Preaching to your followers is nice for your ego, but it won’t necessarily result in new followers.

Regarding UI5 sessions: So many presentations about things that the framework does for you. You just follow the best practices. Approaches you get better solved by just using the recommended SAP tools. Talks that might offer value at other JavaScript conferences, but at a conference about UI5? Nice to fill the agenda with sessions and more sessions. And I was wondering why so many people killed time while waiting hours for another useful session.

Keynotes

A strong focus of both events was to present the work the product teams did over the last year and to highlight features on the roadmap. This was at both keynotes the leading topic: what was done since last year’s event. What’s the status of the backlog. What is being worked on. And how is the internal adoption. So far, it was like attending a sprint review meeting.

reCAP

I was not prepared. Incredible to see CAP leaders talk about lack of funding, the too small team size and that they are underpaid. Did the CAP team not know that the keynote is streamed live? That in the audience are partners and customers? A few people mentioned to me: “Well, when you are on the stage and look to the audience, and in the first 10 rows you only see your team members, of course you think that it is an internal team event. Then you say things not intended for externals.” Nice explanation, but at the UI5con keynote this did not happen. CAP is recommended for development on BTP, but the CAP team is not funded and is missing people? Worse: is even complaining in public about internal issues? What is happening internally that these complaints are done in public? What does this mean regarding support for customers? New features? Do partners and customers have a chance to get their feature requests implemented? Will the CAP team give up in the next 12 months due to a too high workload? Now it’s time for a board member to clarify this on the big stage that CAP is funded, a safe investment. If not: reconsider if you want to use CAP for a productive project.

Besides the strange comments made in public, the keynote contained other news. CAP was already a good technology and is getting better. Plugins are added, a community is built, features are added. I liked that Open Telemetry can be used. I used Elastic APM for this in 2019 with UI5 and CAP. Nice to see that distributed tracing comes to SAP/CAP. The success story of CAP was with a focus on internal topics. It was talked that it won a price, that CAP is used by SAP product team(s?) and that it is worked on an internal project. Thanks for providing this internal status update. But where is the value in this? Are there external references available (Toom showed how they use CAP at a DSAG event in 2023).

The CAP team won an internal price (congratulations, but that’s something for the internal year end celebration party. Winning an internal award is a career changer for internal employees, but what is the value of this information for partners and customers? How many other teams participated? Was any external contribution allowed? What are the criteria to be selected? What does this mean for customers? Is this driving usage adoption outside SAP?). CAP is aligning better with other teams regarding the developer experience on BTP (project Calesi). CAP is used by an SAP product. SAP is marketing the CAP framework as the best thing since sliced bread for developing non-ABAP BTP apps.

One of the problems CAP is facing at customers was not addressed: how to get developers working with CAP. How to get CAP skills a widely available resource? I am not convinced that going for the SAP developers is the best strategy. While this might work inside SAP, it gets complicated at partners and customers. SAP developers are already a rare resource. Trying to get SAP developers to learn CAP is risky. Prove me wrong: It would be better to get the non-SAP developers learn CAP and then let customers / partners upskill CAP developers to SAP. Getting a CAP landscape up and running in BTP is time consuming, costly and still not as easy as it should be. Developers that come from AWS or Azure and want to deploy a CAP app in BTP are facing still too many problems. It would be nice to see what Calesi means for projects. The value customers get by it, how the different components work better together. Learning BTP and the things that you get elsewhere easier solved are a problem regarding adoption. This is not a CAP-only problem, rather a developer experience problem from BTP. However, there a no indications that SAP is going to push CAP outside SAP to at least taking away the task to learn CAP for “new” joiners. Looking at what non-SAP developers are used to working with: CAP would offer such great benefit to them. Yet, there seems to be no incentive.

UI5con

Over the last years, I wondered what the future focus of UI5con will be. In my last year’s post for UI5con 2023 I wrote that the conference is missing on the reality of UI5 developers: writing Fiori apps. See also the above mentioned BTP Dev Guide if you wonder why Fiori Elements is important. This year, the decision was again to focus on low level UI5 topics. This turns UI5con once and for all into an event for developers that work with UI5 on the lowest level: full UI5 freestyle apps, UI5 controls development and tooling. The problem: that’s not the main user group of UI5. Of course, it is when you look at it from the UI5 developer team. The UI5 developer working in a project must do more than “just” developing a UI5 app. Seems that the future of UI5con is to be an event where SAP employees share which items from the backlog were implemented.

The keynote itself? A new logo. A survey. Tooling. SAPUI5 2.0. Web Components. AI. General updates. You can see that the UI5 team is used to focus on people. Much news was also focused on the end user (aka developer). WC playground, linter, tools to help implement best practices. UI5 2.0 will come, later this year. Not a big surprise: the version increase comes with more work than expected. There is now a Customer Engagement Initiative for UI5 to help and learn from customers that migrate to UI5 2.0. I missed a roadmap regarding UI5 2.0: timeline, what happens to 1.0, how to get it, etc. The AI demo: nice. But seriously: when I have to type this prompt, I can also write the app. This is still the main problem at the SAP AI demos. Somehow, I am hoping for AI tools that help me do my work. For instance: here is my UI5 app I wrote in 2016. Make it best practice compliant so the ui5 linter does not complain and I can use it with UI5 2.0. Or: here is my old master detail app. Convert it to flexible column layout.

Audience

SAP employees presenting to SAP employees? No, this was not the case. However, a strong focus on internal was evident. Nice side effect: the canteen during lunch was not crowded. The session felt like a sprint review where the released features of the last months are presented. While the public discussion of internal projects and decisions is nice, it is of little to no value for everyone that is not an SAP employee. But it’s great for SAP employees as they can show what they did and well, and they can talk about it the next time they meet in person or virtually with their teammates.

I’d like (or hope for) that both conferences build a personas of the typical developer and align the agenda to it. What is this person doing daily, what news might help that person? My impression is that sessions are selected by personal interest of the speaker, and that the orga team knows the speaker. Stuff that happens when a conference allows the program committee to not only evaluate proposals, but also to submit their own session. This is a behavior I do not like much. It contains just a too high risk that the quality is impacted.

I talked with some attendees. Yes, I know: big mistake. A common remark was: really cool event, cool people, great sessions, it’s a shame I cannot use this at work. At work people are than either using an on-premise FES hub, have to work with older UI5 versions, trying to figure out how UI adoption / flexibility works or “just” work with Fiori Elements. These developers are trying to figure out how to administer the Fiori Launchpad, how to roll-out roles, content and apps, how to ensure SSO works, that their end users get the full Fiori experience from Laptop to smart watch. They are struggling to understand how annotations work, how the Fiori Elements Analytics Page shows the correct filters, how to simply develop Fiori apps that can be maintained by a small team – the one man software fabric. For these people it is super nice to attend UI5con and see what could be possible. They just won’t benefit from most things shown soon. How many customers are still using “old” UI5 versions? The maintenance status page lists versions down to 1.38.x as supported. If the world would be as presented at UI5con, at least anything older than 1.96 could be removed (that’s FES 2021). They are searching for best practices, for tips, for guidance. For them the reality is VS Code or BAS and the Fiori tooling. Either the cool, recommended ui5 tooling plugins are part of the standard Fiori template, or they won’t use it. Testing is considered important, but they search tools that make it easy. This gap in UI5con content and customer reality does stand out, thanks to the partners presenting and being at UI5con. I guess there were 30% SAP employees, less than 30% customers and therefore 40+% partners. That’s 70+% of “yes sayers” at the event. Let’s see how much of the technical content provided in 2023 and 2024 will be used (and maybe presented?) by a customer in 2025. At least for UI5 2.0 this should not be a problem.

Taking the above points into consideration, both UI5con and reCAP found their destination as internal events that are open for external developers to listen to. The target group of both events are the hard-core, low-level developers. For those, both events are like a dream come true. Normally works just fine for open-source projects. These events have their core maintainer summits where the developers of the project can meet.

Things I missed

reCAP and UI5con are from the core developers, for core developers. Developers working at customers should not expect to learn things they can use instantly on their projects. Albeit at least for CAP it is easier to apply the new things on projects. UI5 developers are more stuck to the release available in the customer environment. Few might be able to start using UI5 2.0 still this year. The majority won’t and will continue to use the UI controls that come with smart controls or Fiori Elements.

I am (still) missing a stand-alone UI5 theme designer. Without a theme designer that makes it easy for non-SAP teams/developers to use UI5 for non-SAP apps and scenarios, I find it hard to see good reasons why to use UI5 outside SAP without one. This brings me back to WC usage outside SAP, yet … focus was on WC usage inside UI5.

There was a gap regarding Fiori topics in the agenda. For instance, the Fiori Launchpad. Or how to run a UI5 app from BTP. Generally, I missed best practices: how to use DBaaS, update a CAP app, using CDS, tips and tricks regarding annotations. How to deploy UI5 apps in BTP, make them available in Work Zone, upgrade them, etc. Lessons learned from projects.

Regarding CAP and UI5 are working closely together: CAP is the recommended framework for developing non-ABAP applications on BTP. The BTP Dev Guide contains the following statement: “The overall recommendation would be to use as much SAP Fiori elements as possible, as much SAPUI5 freestyle as needed.” [SAP Help] That’s the essence of my post about UI5 skills. Strange to see that the same people that get upset of the simple fact that even outlined in the dev guide.

From a Sapphire/ASUG presentation:

We [SAP] use SAP Fiori elements to build most apps fro SAP S/4HANA

I am starting to feel sorry for customers that listen or depend on consultants that develop freestyle UI5 apps, because that’s the best for them. Best for the developer/consultant, not the customer.