ABAP stands for Advanced Business Application Programming. It is a programming language developed by SAP. SAP is a German company that develops ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning System) systems. These systems are used by companies to track all information related to the business integrating finance, sales, and materials data. ABAP/4 is the programming language used for the thousand tiny embedded programs called transactions that make up the application. The /4 means it is a fourth-generation language.
SAP is very flexible, it can be used for specific business functions rather than the whole enterprise and can be modified for the companies specific needs. Every SAP installation has its own specific configuration and set of functions. The cost of customizing is that when upgraded every customization must be identified in the ABAP code and changes made.
Special features and the larger ABAP infrastructure
ABAP doesn’t stand alone, and it is highly integrated with other features of the SAP NetWeaver ABAP application server. Among these are the following:
- Logical database connections, which allow code to be abstracted from a specific database. The actual database connections are configured outside of ABAP code, allowing the same code to be used in different database environments.
- Open SQL, an abstraction of SQL syntax that is part of the ABAP language and which the ABAP runtime environment converts to native SQL that is appropriate for the database being used. Open SQL has many similarities to Microsoft .NET’s Language Integrated Query (LINQ) concept.
- Internal Tables, which hold collections of objects that are accessed using special language keywords or Open SQL. This ABAP concept contrasts with the concept of typed arrays like in Java or C++.
- Security, in which ABAP is integrated with SAP NetWeaver’s security infrastructure.
- Data Dictionary, a universal dictionary of data structure definitions, often including business logic, which is available to all ABAP programs in a system.
- Change and Transport System (CTS), which tracks changes to development objects and manages the promotion of development objects to quality assurance and production environments.
- Shared development system, which is an important aspect of ABAP. ABAP differs from most newer languages in that development usually takes place on a shared system, with all developers working on the same set of development objects at the same time.
ABAP and HANA
ABAP continues to be an important part of SAP’s technology stack.
Though it has played a reduced role in many products with the advent of the HANA platform, it is still central to SAP’s most widely deployed products, plays an important role in SAP’s next-generation S/4HANA ERP platform and has been announced as a runtime for the SAP Cloud Platform.
Hire one of Our SAP ABAP resources on hourly or full time (dedicated monthly) basis who are trusted by our customers for their technical expertise. Our dedicated SAP ABAP people have gained excellence in executing projects of small, mid, and large scale businesses across a wide range of industry verticals.