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The UI development toolkit for HTML5 (SAPUI5) is a platform for developing rich user interfaces for modern Web business applications.

Note

This is the SAPUI5 documentation version for SAP NetWeaver Application Server for ABAP and the User Interface Add-On for SAP NetWeaver.

For an overview of all available versions of the documentation, see Available Documentation.

SAPUI5 has the following advantages:

  • SAPUI5 is an enterprise-ready web toolkit with powerful development concepts:

    • Built-in extensibility concepts at code and application level

    • Data binding types and Model-View-Controller (MVC)

    • Full translation support

    • Keyboard interaction support and accessiblity features

    And many more....

  • Apps developed with SAPUI5 present one consistent user experience.

  • SAPUI5 comes with many feature-rich UI controls for handling complex UI patterns and predefined layouts for typical use cases.

  • Apps built with SAPUI5 are responsive across browsers and devices - they run on smartphones, tablets, and desktops. The UI controls automatically adapt themselves to the capabilities of each device.

Tip OpenUI5, an open source version of the UI development toolkit for HTML5, is available at http://openui5.org/Information published on non-SAP site.

SAPUI5 is a client UI technology based on JavaScript, CSS and HTML5. SAPUI5 applications run within a browser.

Servers come into play for deploying your applications, storing the SAPUI5 libraries, and connecting to a database. Depending on the environment in which you are using SAPUI5, the libraries and your applications are stored for instance on an SAP NetWeaver Application Server or an SAP HANA Cloud Platform. The preferred way to access business data for your application is by using the OData model through an SAP Gateway.

When users access an SAPUI5 application from their device, a request is sent to the respective server to load the application into the browser. The view accesses the relevant libraries. Usually, the model is also instantiated and business data is fetched from the database.

The SAPUI5 runtime is a client-side HTML5 rendering library containing a rich set of standard and extension controls. It provides a lightweight programming model for desktop and mobile applications. Based on JavaScript, it supports Rich Internet Application (RIA) like client-side features. SAPUI5 complies with OpenAjax and can be used together with standard JavaScript libraries.