Android development for SAP

[Former Member]

Hello Everyone,

I'm keen on learning SAP mobile application development for which I started to look into the mobile area within SDN. I found that application can be developed for various platforms like iPhone, Android, Blackberry etc. I'm more keen on Android so started checking the Android links within the SAP Mobile area.

Now I'm little confused. It takes me to the Android website wherein I have the lots of information including how to develop android applications. I'm fine with that but I'm not sure how it is going to interact with SAP. I've worked on the Hello Android tutorial but I do not seem to see a path which will led me to the development of these application working within SAP.

Please if anyone can clear the picture so that I'm able to understand the whole scenario & work further towards my learning of the SAP mobile development.

Your help would be appreciated.

Thanks & Regards,

Pro

[brenton_ocallaghan · Accepted solution]

Hi Pro,

Welcome to the forum. When it comes to interacting with SAP from Android (or any other mobile platform for that matter) you will need to look at one of 3 ways:

1) Sybase Unwired Platform - A server that allows access to the back-end SAP through the exposition of certain functions. This also has the added advantage of generating code for you which automatically takes care of the back end connection as well as offline functionality (so in your case that code would be in JAVA). With the release of version 2.1 in the last few days - Android is fully supported as well.

2) REST services - This is where you can write some code in the back-end (SAP System) which will allow you to consume resources using JSON or XML. This would be using a web service and can be quite effective for certain applications. Usually you would need some ABAP experience to do this as you would have to write the REST service to expose the service/data you wish to build on.

3) SAP Gateway - this, like SUP, is a server that exposes services from the back end and allows you to consume them in a similar way to a REST service. Much data is available on the SAP website on this topic as well as a log of videos to show what it can do.

What kind of functionality are you hoping to achieve in your mobile app?

Hope that helps,

Brenton.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Brenton,

Thanks very much for your detailed reply. It gives quite a bit of information to me.

I'll try to go through the details on each of the above topics you mentioned. I'm basically from java backgroud and a portal consultant who wanted to do something on the mobile area. I'm not much into ABAP. So option 2 does not much feasible but will surely have a look into that.

But I was little happy to go to the Android website as I was able to develop & test the applications in the emulator without much fuss. But that much of flexibility is will not be there I understand with the approaches you mentioned, I again need to have licenses for the servers in order to work with my applications & deploy.

Anyway I was not looking for any specific kind of application but similar to the ones we have in SAP like any customer or supplier portal etc. I still do not see a clear picture to be true but trying to understand it at the moment.

Thanks again. I'll will come back in case I've further queries on these.

Regards,

Pro