TechnologyDriven

A recently published whitepaper gives us more details about “Project Muse“, the new SAP-GUI, and SAP’s UI-strategy in general.

The cornerstones of SAP’s UI-family:

• Project Muse: Rich Internet Application (RIA) based on Adobe’s Apollo that integrates traditional Dynpros, WebDynpros and web-applications as kind of an alternative client for the browser-based Portal (”business browser”), but with improved user-experience and full desktop integration e.g. with MS Office
• Browser-based access within Enterprise Portal: The portal will continue to be the central point for browser based access to SAP’s applications, but become a face-lift and performance improvements with the help of AJAX-technology
• Duet: Access to some business processes from within Office-applications for casual, operational users
• Underlying UI-technology: Tools to build, model and compose user-interfaces (e.g. Visual Composer and WebDynpro-Tools), UI “building blocks” (enterprise search, knowledge management, …) and UI runtime services (roles, i18n, navigation, …)

In former R/3-times, UI- and application logic used to be wired together in Dynpros and transactions. In today’s ESA-times, we finally see a clear separation of the presentation and business logic layers, which makes it possible to connect a lot of different clients to the the ERP’s business services. Perhaps, as Thomas Otter states, this will lead to “a world where the GUI will change often”. Clearly, UI-technologies (and trends) change more often than business applications do.

(from SDN)