SAP ABAP: The rundown

To be clear, it goes without saying that various organisations that utilise SAP ERP software are no stranger to Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP). Having been originally developed in the 1980’s, ABAP is a sophisticated high-end programming language designed by SAP that is utilised by many developers in order to customize SAP ERP platforms. ABAP allows for the ability to customise workflows for asset management, materials management, and much more. Having been exclusively designed to facilitate the mass-processing of data in different SAP business applications, ABAP therefore helped to solve obstacles with time-consuming manual processes and an overflow of data.

Browse SAP Roles

Currently, there is generally an urgent demand for companies and their staffing to be more flexible. However, without a concise and efficient IT infrastructure, the majority of digital processes, websites or apps will stagnate, and our economy will thus remain at a standstill. Bear in mind though that with the wide-spread digitisation of many business processes, there is now an exponentially larger need for more experienced developers with a comprehensive understanding of both business and IT, which in turn is where ABAP comes in.

A select number of organisations today still tend to face hurdles when recognising and consistently maintaining ABAP and its customisation options within their SAP systems primarily due to the complexity of the programming language, as well as other factors such as time consumption, cost, and the need for experienced professionals.

Moreover, ABAP is not a singularly functioning software, there are a plethora of features on the SAP NetWeaver ABAP application server, including:

Shared development system – This is an important aspect of ABAP, mainly because ABAP differs from many newer programming languages as development would often take place on a shared system, allowing all developers to work on the same set of development objects simultaneously.

Open SQL – This is an abstraction of SQL syntax that is a key part of the ABAP programming language, which the runtime environment of ABAP then converts to a native form of SQL which is suitable for the database in use. As a matter of fact, Open SQL has numerous similarities to the Microsoft’s .NET’s Language Integrated Query (LINQ) concept.

Data Dictionary – Putting it simply, a data dictionary consists of data structure definitions, including different types of business logic that are accessible to all ABAP programs in a given system.

Logical database connections – These connections are crucial for permitting code to be properly extracted and manipulated in a particular database. Now given that the actual database connections are configured externally from the ABAP code, which can then be utilised across a range of database environments.

What is SAP FICO?