“This is my 38th day of participating in the First Challenge 2022. For details: First Challenge 2022”
Sybase SUP is a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP). This is a type of middleware for managing mobile applications. The main function is to store and transfer data between SAP and mobile devices.
To do this, it caches a subset of SAP data and synchronizes that data between SAP and mobile devices.
It also includes development tools for creating applications for a (limited) number of platforms.
Sybase SUP provides another way to create mobile applications that talk directly to SAP via Web Services (without using any middleware products).
How does it work?
SUP uses remote-enabled Function Modules (BAPI) to integrate with SAP.
In SUP, THE BAPI is defined to create objects called Mobile Business Objects (MBO). These are loosely related to real-world objects, such as customers or sales orders. These objects have properties (related to the arguments of the BAPI) and operations (related to the operations of the BAPI, that is, its role).
Interestingly, you can pick and choose the BAPI parameters that interest you, which makes it much easier (visually) for non-Abappers to understand the MBO than trying to decipher the BAPI definition.
The data is stored in SUP in the Cache Database (CDB) associated with the MBO.
Mobile applications can get and set data against these objects — or, for some applications, you can set them to read directly to the enterprise information server (SAP).
Therefore, in most cases, synchronization is required between SAP and SUP as well as between SUP and mobile devices.
SAP/SUP synchronization can be “push” (where SAP notifies SUP when an object changes) or “pull” (where SUP requests data at a specified interval).
SUP/ device synchronization can be “message-based,” where SUP sends a message to a device notifying it of changes, or “copy-based,” where synchronization occurs at a specified interval. The type of synchronization used depends on the mobile device — for example, iphones and ipads can only accept message-based synchronization.
Which mobile platforms does it support?
Sybase SUP supports iOS (iPhone, iPad), BlackBerry, Palm, and Windows Mobile.
SUP is suitable for companies embarking on a comprehensive mobile strategy that needs a platform to manage a large number of applications or a large number of users. If you have a lot of staff using mobile applications (rather than them calling Web services directly on SAP), it will definitely reduce the number of clicks on your SAP system.