Tuesday 19 March 2013

Introduction To ABAP/4


ABAP 4 is a Fourth Generation language (4GL) developed by SAP for the interactive development of application programming. ABAP originally abbreviated as Allgemeiner BerichtsAufbereitungsProzessor, German for "generic report preparation processor", but was later renamed to the English Advanced Business Application Programming.
ABAP was first developed by SAP in 1980’s as a report language for SAP R/2. It was then used by developers to build SAP R/3 system and by SAP Customers (SAP Customers refers to the company you work for. All the programs you make through ABAP are referred as ‘Customer Programs’) to customize the SAP applications as per user requirements, to develop reports, interfaces etc. All application programs, along with parts of the R/3 Basis system, are written in the ABAP Workbench using ABAP, SAP’s programming language. ABAP/4 is tightly integrated across all the modules viz like SD, MM, HR etc and most or all of the modules and transactions(like screens are created using ABAP). ABAP is presently positioned alongside Java, as the language for programming the SAP Application Server, part of its NetWeaver platform for building business applications. As an opinion of ABAP professionals the syntax of ABAP is somewhat similar to COBOL.
ABAP is Case-insensitive and platform independent language.

ABAP is one of the first programming languages to include the concept of logical databases, which provides a high level of abstraction from the centralized database of the SAP system. Logical databases are special ABAP programs that retrieve data and make it available to application programs. The most common use of logical databases is still to read data from database tables by linking them to executable ABAP programs. Apart from the concept of logical databases, you can also use Structured Query Language (SQL) statements to retrieve and manipulate data from the centralized database

The above brief introduction to ABAP is sufficient enough for you to learn the language. Now, before jumping directly to the tutorials I suggest you to first understand the Basic terminologies and architecture of SAP.

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