SAP-FIORI- introduction:As many people will be, aware SAP is changing its user experience and design philosophy

for
the better. Fiori along with the SAPUI5 development platform is the future, not only for mobile
but for the overall user interface to SAP. On the other hand, in SAP's words "deliver consumergrade user experience to our most broadly and frequently used business transactions".
Meaning flowers in Italian, Fiori provides a consistent, responsive user experience (UX) that will
allow people to use SAP across various devices. Each app will follow this same philosophy and
provide a simple intuitive interface that users will want to use and will help them achieve their
goals.
Why is SAP Fiori Different?
There have been many new web development technologies like ITS, BSP and ABAP WDP which
provided good options for developing web applications alongside the core SAP GUI reports and
transactions. The reason Fiori is different is because SAP have released this as the new version of
the SAP GUI and are putting a lot of effort into writing Fiori apps to replicate functionality of the
standard SAP system. These apps are also available for free to all SAP customers (the one caveat
is that some of them require Hana so you can't use these unless you have Hana, many don't
require Hana though). They have also stated that anything new they create will use the SAP
Fiori/SAPUI5 route.
SAP UI5 and the future of ABAP
Fiori apps are developed using SAPUI5 which is based on HTML5, JavaScript and JQuery along
with custom SAP specific libraries. Like many of the other web platforms ABAP is still the key
language for accessing the date on a SAP backend system. Within Fiori/SAPUI5 the ABAP code
is accessed via OData services. I don't want to go into this too much here but the OData service
allows access to class methods which can select data from SAP tables or perform other types of
ABAP processing before passing values back to the Fiori app. Plus standard ABAP reports etc
will still be in demand for a good few years so no need for ABAPer's to panic yet, just have a
look at complimenting technologies such as HTML5, CSS, Javascript and jQuery if you haven't
already done so.