# #32 From ITS to abap2UI5 Twenty-seven years of SAP user interfaces, laid out end to end — because the shape of this line is easy to misremember, and the misremembering is usually "everything moved to the browser and stayed there". **ITS, 1996.** Dynpro screens rendered as HTML by the server. Every interaction a full page from the server. Still in warehouses today, on scanners, outliving several of its successors without any fuss about it. **BSP, 2001.** HTML and JavaScript written inside the ABAP stack, with ABAP embedded for logic. Server-side rendering again, with real control over the markup. **Web Dynpro ABAP, 2006.** Views, context and controllers defined in ABAP. A component model rather than a page model — and still the server building the HTML. **UI5 Freestyle, 2012.** The rendering moves. JavaScript, XML views and UI5 controls run in the browser; the backend delivers data through OData and stops having an opinion about the screen. **RAP and Fiori Elements, 2019.** The UI definition returns to ABAP as CDS annotations, and a runtime in the browser turns them into the app. **abap2UI5, 2023.** The backend sends the XML view itself, and a static UI5 app renders it.  *Twenty-seven years, and the one move that did not reverse.* Read as a line, it is not a march away from the server. For the first fifteen years ABAP built the HTML. Then rendering left for the browser, where it stays — because that is where a modern UI belongs, and nobody is seriously proposing otherwise. What has been moving back ever since is not the rendering but the **definition** of the screen: first as annotations, then as the view itself. Which makes Over-the-Wire less of a new idea than a returning one, arriving with the part the old server-rendered world never had — a real control library in the browser.