Month: June 2017

Hello reader,

instead of the planned walk through the city park and drinking some beer(s) mother nature swinging moods changed my plans and in place of the shiny sun gave me hard rain and sour mouth. In a situation like that, alone and bored I decided to bore you too and share this short text about two good friends called Grails and SAPUI5 (respect to the OpenUI5 project too). 🙂

I’ve been working hard with the Grails framework this couple of years and different situations led me to different scenarios. Lately I found myself in situation that asked bringing closer the powerful SAP services to the web/mobile clients. And what is better that using the outsourced JavaScript MVC framework made by SAP called SAPUI5 or if you prefer the open source project name OpenUI5 in conjunction with the versatile Grails Framework.

If you’re familiar with Grails then you certainly know that with the latest 3++ versions of Grails there is great support for already established and pretty much famous frameworks/libraries AngularJS and ReactJS in forms of Grails app profiles and plugins. But there is no “official” support for interbridging SAPUI5 and Grails and that is the main motive for writing this blog post and sharing it with you.

SAPUI5 is a single paged application where all the magic is done with JS so what we need is a single html file or in this case a single gsp file. We use that file to define the paths to the SAPUI5 runtime (or sdk) resources and to init the main SAPUI5 application via short JavaScript code. SAPUI5 is best when used with the OData services and that its where this software shines, however it has also great support when working with JSON and provides us with swift JSONModel that we can use to fill up the application data. And because we have JSON then we must have the Restful Grails controllers that will provide us with well defined JSON.

So the situation is pretty simple: Grails connects us with the backend via web services (or else?) or it provides us the data on its own via GORM or something else. Then Grails transforms the data into a JSON format that is a sweet cake for the SAPUI5 to consume and make it look great both on web browsers and on any mobile clients (Smart phones, tablets etc.).

Well this won’t be worth a penny without a working example, right? Because that’s the cause I’ve published a little demo of Grails and SAPUI5 playing together that you can check it on github. In short words we have a Spring Security Core plugin for the authentication and authorization, the JSON Views plugin for making the JSON even easier and also an example how to make it work via rest based http calls if your clients is native app . And of course the SAPUI5 application itself.

Here’s the link to the repo.

Thanks for reading,

cheers.