Custom Development on iPad or iPhones

[Former Member]

Hi All,

What is the infrastruture need to start developing SAP Mobile apps on an iPhone or iPad. By Infrastruture i mean IDE's, Plugins, Licensing etc. I would like to build this app using the existing SAP Mobile Infrastructure(not SUP).

How do I start off? Is there any documentation/Blog that could help in this respect?

Any help would be hugely appreciated..

Thanks & Regards,

Johannes.

[Former Member]

Hi Johannes,

There are some architecture decisions that you need to make before beginning to build custom mobile applications that integrate with SAP.

While I do understand that you wish to build this application using the SAP Mobile Infrastructure, the way that we have chosen to build solutions for our clients that want apps for iOS (the OS for iPhone & iPad) is to create either native or web based applications (or even a combination of both).

If this is a direction you might consider heading, here is a quick overview of how you might go about it...

Firstly, decide what sort of application you would like to build - native or web?

A web application for iOS is built in pretty much the same way you would build any web app (using HTML, CSS & a Server Side language) but with a couple of differences:

1. You can tailor the user interface to the device itself to provide a much more engaging user experience.

2. You can take advantage of some of the built in iOS functionality with support for geo-location, keyboard selection, client side storage and a host of other goodies provided by HTML5.

Building a web app is a really great way to get started on iOS. It offers much of the look, feel and functionality of a native application without the headaches of distribution and the learning curve of Objective-C.

If you're thinking of building a native application for iOS you will need to:

1. Sign up for the iOS Developer Program ($99 USD)

2. Download the iOS SDK (Learn Objective-C if you don't already know it)

4. Build & Test your application

5. Distribute through the App Store (or In-house through the Enterprise program)

Whichever option you choose youu2019ll most likely wish to interface with SAP using web services as an interface to a BAPI in the back end system. There's a great wizard tool in SAP within txn SE37 to help you do that so I wonu2019t go into detail on how to do that here but we will be launching a new blog here at Clarimont Consulting shortly which will provide some more information on how to start building custom mobile solutions for SAP, looking at both front-end and back-end development as well as integration techniques.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about this feel free to drop me an email at stuart.hilditch at clarimont.com

Hope this helps and good luck!!

Stu