So I've been playing with AppBuilder since Monday of this week. It's a nice IDE. Better control over SUP platform. The concept is nice. But I feel it's really trying hard to minimize the developer's control of coding and it's trying to keep the developer from just getting something done by drag and drop. Which all these works really well.
But here are my take so far with this IDE. Note, however, that this is still all new to me so there could be some things that I have not looked at or missed; which is why I decided to start this conversation and hope to shed some light
If AppBuilder is base on SAPUI5, then why hide the the developer from the main logic of the screen. For example, HomePage.view.html is tabbed base. I am using the segmented buttons. The online video demo is clear how the button can display the image. But it isn't clear how I would open a new page. I looked at the sample coding from SAPUI5 SDK - Demo Kit and it's pretty straight forward looking at the "Hello World Example"...
Steps:
1. create a new App instance: var app =new sap.m.App("myApp",{initialPage:"page1"});// page1 should be displayed first
2. Create a page:
// create the first page of your application
var page1 =new sap.m.Page("page1",{
title:"Initial Page",
content :new sap.m.Button({ // content is just one Button
text :"Go to Page 2",
press : function(){
app.to("page2"); // when pressed, it triggers drilldown to page 2
}
})
});
3. Create a 2nd page, just like the above syntax
4. add both page instances to the app instance
Why is AppBuilder not this easy? The advantage that AppBuilder provides is the WYSIWYG. The main HTML5 element attributes are all pretty much there. But there's no way to override the source page to add other attributes that is not in the properties pane. For example, the Input is missing the attribute for "required".
I noticed yesterday that there is the "<> HTML" tool in the ToolBox. Which is exactly what HTMLView would be used for in SUP. Which tells me it's still trying to abstract the developer from coding and trying to constrain them into just drag and drop and that it's provided this "new" HTMLView in case there's something else that needs to be done that the builder cannot provide.
I thought that AppBuilder, unlike SUP Unwired Workspace, would provide what it is providing now; but gives me complete access to the dynamically built code which I was expecting to see SAPUI5 syntax. But right now it's just looking like a glorified version of SUP.
Just my two cents. Would like to hear from others. Thanks.