ABAP Turns 40 | SAP News Heart
5 min read
Table of Contents
As ABAP reaches a momentous 40th anniversary this yr, we just take a nostalgic appear again, reminiscing about the beginnings of the legendary programming language, its evolutionary milestones, and the a great number of developers who have formed its background and its long term.
“If you genuinely want to have an impression on the world, devoid of any person noticing it, then you should really understand ABAP. Because ABAP is just about everywhere,” says Sonja Liénard, vice president of ABAP Developer Resources at SAP. “About 80% of all enterprise transactions operate on ABAP.”
Obviously, Liénard’s enthusiasm for SAP’s very own programming language is boundless. And this sentiment is mirrored by plenty of other people who have possibly created or learned to adore ABAP more than its 40-year heritage. We spoke with some of them in celebration of this unique milestone.
What is ABAP?
ABAP is SAP’s personal programming language. It is designed for setting up and running enterprise-crucial purposes. The abbreviation stands for State-of-the-art Business enterprise Software Programming.
The Beginning
Whilst we can’t be guaranteed of its correct date of delivery, ABAP’s origins can be traced back again to an strategy SAP Co-Founder Klaus Tschira experienced. He designed a doc examination application working with assembler macros to decide on and output details as a list for the true-time money account and components management technique (RFM). In the 1980s, Gerd Rodé made ABAP/4 as a standalone fourth generation programming language (4GL) that, together with the report formatting processor, presented the interpreter on the SAP R/2 process.
As the tale goes, there had been numerous developers across SAP inventing programming languages at the time. This did not sit very well with administration, so they had been requested to go again to producing apps – not languages. On the other hand, Rodé was passionate about the language and spent numerous weekends and considerably of his no cost time making ABAP. His attempts paid out off: which is the power of a person.
SAP’s builders utilised ABAP/4 in the early 1990s to system each and every module in SAP R/3. As the firm expanded into new markets abroad ABAP was renamed Highly developed Business Software Programming.
In accordance to Karl Kessler, a product or service supervisor who joined SAP in 1992, “A substantial aspect of SAP’s DNA is coded in ABAP. Fifty p.c of SAP R/2 was coded in ABAP and 100% of SAP R/3 purposes is ABAP. So, it played an exceptionally central function.”
He extra that ABAP normally necessary to evolve to keep appropriate as new software emerged, no matter whether this was the Microsoft equipment in the 1990s or cloud-native resources much more a short while ago. “ABAP was always capable to combine innovation coming from the outside though optimizing business procedures together the way. And in this regard, I believe, ABAP’s part has not fundamentally changed more than the earlier 40 decades.”
The Evolution
ABAP has occur a long way due to the fact its inception. In late 2016, when everybody was speaking about cloud computing as the following major detail, SAP commenced questioning irrespective of whether the corporation ought to nevertheless invest in its proprietary programming language.
Harald Kuck, who was then in charge of the ABAP platform, with each other with Boris Gebhardt, the chief products operator, explained to the Executive and Supervisory Boards they firmly thought the organization should really keep on its ABAP expense. In reality, Kuck stated, “If this were being my enterprise, I would seek the services of 100 youthful ABAP builders to guarantee we can satisfy the long term ABAP need of our clients, partners and SAP.”
That argument, among the many others, worked and they managed to get the go-in advance to launch the future chapter in ABAP’s results story. SAP BTP, ABAP natural environment connects the primary SAP know-how to the environment of cloud computing and has presently served a lot of SAP ERP buyers change to the new cloud environment with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Engineering System.
The Foreseeable future
Currently, ABAP Cloud is the progress design applied to develop cloud-ready organization apps, solutions, and extensions on SAP BTP ABAP surroundings, the community and non-public editions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and the on-premise SAP S/4HANA.
“It’s critical not to confuse traditional ABAP with ABAP Cloud. With ABAP Cloud, the classic ABAP has been totally refactored,” Kuck suggests. “ABAP is the ERP system market leader for on-prem, and ABAP Cloud is our finest bet for cloud ERP. ABAP Cloud offers particularly the route concerning our ERP variants that our shoppers ask for [for example, clean core].”
Think about ABAP Cloud this way, he states: “Apple is hugely prosperous nowadays with iOS and that is a refactored Unix process with roots that are even older than ABAP’s.”
Kuck is certain that the correct impressive prospective of ABAP Cloud lies in the reality that it is “a solitary motor that can run equally in the cloud and on premise, and as a result optimally support hybrid eventualities — with a path for personalized code from on-premise to personal or community cloud, or even to SAP BTP.”
In accordance to Kuck, organization-readiness is built in as a result of ABAP, today, just as in the past. And that is precisely what our consumers need in buy to change their extension codes into the cloud atmosphere.
“Only SAP can offer the advantages of ABAP Cloud. There are no rivals listed here,” he suggests. That is why he thinks prospects, companions, and SAP require to appeal to a new era of ABAP builders.
The Voice of a New ABAP Era
An totally new era of builders has appear to love and respect the language. Felix Draeger is a 28-year-previous who works on the ABAP platform as a consumer aid developer.
“I imagine ABAP is below to stay,” he suggests. “It has a ton of pre-configured entities. For case in point, a good deal of databases tables now exist and a lot of infrastructure is furnished by ABAP. This is, for example, not the case in Java in which I may possibly have libraries and other handy points, but I would have to produce almost everything from scratch, from the databases tables to the application. And that is a long procedure. So, I would say ABAP is efficient in this regard.”
He enjoys functioning with ABAP mainly because “there are usually items to find out. You need to imagine incredibly deeply, do investigation, and acquire expert understanding. We can actually link as a result of ABAP. There is an overall local community of ABAP lovers.”
Since the commence of the 2000s, ABAP has adapted with the instances, and together with ABAP Cloud, proceeds to have a major affect on the potential accomplishment of SAP and its prospects.
