Where is OpenUI5 today?

OpenUI5 is SAP’s open-source Web UI framework, supporting the SAP Fiori design system for products. It celebrates its 10th anniversary, with many highlights that have shaped an incredible developer community. OpenUI5 will continue to innovate, ensuring a consistent and modern user experience for web applications.

The size of OpenUI5 grew with its capabilities, with its APIs and with its number of controls, especially as old features were not removed for compatibility reasons, to stay upgrade compatible. This compatibility is a challenge in Web development: Web development standards evolve, new security gaps continuously appear and need to be closed, Web browsers evolve and have new features to take advantage of (e.g. for better performance). Therefore, it is not an option for modern UI technologies to rest on a status quo. As many developers rely on a stable and secure UI technology, OpenUI5 needs to innovate in time to stay competitive and future proof in this dynamic environment. On the other hand, the evolution of Web technologies also brings great value and opportunities to innovate, both for developers and well as with an improved and faster user experience for business users.

The next step: OpenUI5 2.x

To be able to continue with this successful journey, we need to make sure that:

• UIs are staying interactive with less code to be loaded and by avoiding synchronous JavaScript.
• Security can be ensured with the strict Content Security Policy (CSP).
• Development of OpenUI5 framework as well as application developers remain efficient.
• Applications are compliant with the evolution of browsers (and restrictions they introduce).

For this the UI5 team needs to remove non-compliant, deprecated libraries and functionality from the OpenUI5 framework. In doing so, we need to find the right balance between upgrade stability and agility for innovations.

OpenUI5 2.x is renewing OpenUI5
by removing everything not required to comply with OpenUI5 best practices.

The value of OpenUI5 2.x

OpenUI5 2.x allows to evolve in these areas:

• Security: OpenUI5 2.x enforces an improved security with strict Content Security Policy (CSP).
• Smooth UI performance: OpenUI5 2.x assists with an improved UI performance by using fine granular tasks and asynchronous JavaScript only.
• General performance: With the modular core, new bootstrap and additional opportunities to improve performance we expect to see a better experience when launching and using OpenUI5 apps.
• Micro frontends: The removal of Globals simplifies the orchestration of micro frontends.
• App development: With streamlined APIs application developers learn and develop with OpenUI5 more easily.
• Best practices: OpenUI5 2.x means less effort for application developers to follow OpenUI5 best practices.
• Browser: OpenUI5 2.x makes it easier to stay up to date with the browser evolution.
• Web standards: OpenUI5 2.x enables a simple adoption of latest Web standards, e.g. CSS custom properties.
• Pace of innovation: It becomes easier for the UI5 team as well as for application developers to make progress. At the same time, less resources are needed for maintenance, shifting the focus towards innovative, yet stable capabilities.

Recommendation for moving from OpenUI5 1.x to 2.x

Follow the latest Best Practices for App Developers of OpenUI5 1.x
Applications following these best practices will run smoothly with OpenUI5 2.x, no migration effort needed.

Call to Action

The UI5 team now offers a first version of OpenUI5 2.x https://sdk.openui5.org/nightly/2/index.html for testing purposes (Disclaimer: This is a version with daily updates, possible API changes and temporary bugs.)

1. Make yourself familiar with the Best Practices. (Updated instructions will follow.)
2. Review your application code, e.g. by removing of any usage of deprecated APIs. Test your custom OpenUI5 apps for OpenUI5 2.x compatibility by simply pointing the bootstrap to https://sdk.openui5.org/nightly/2/resources/sap-ui-core.js

The team continues working on OpenUI5 2.x and the best practices for application development. To support the process of moving an app from 1.x to 2.x. the UI5 team is currently looking into which documentation and tool support can help with the manual migration of custom code.

Your feedback is highly appreciated: Please add feedback to GitHub by reporting an issue at https://github.com/SAP/openui5/issues/new and prefix the title with “[UI5 2.x]”.