INTRODUCTION TO SAP ABAP

Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) is a high-level programming language created by the German software company SAP. It is an interpreted programming language that runs in the SAP ABAP Runtime environment and is the main language used for building solid-state business application solutions in the SAP Runtime environment.

With the introduction of the Netweaver release, certain applications such as Portal technology were best run on a JAVA based solution, such as J2EE. SAP Netweaver also has a JAVA based runtime environment, which runs JAVA based solutions that have been deployed to the SAP JAVA server.

ABAP programming language is used to develop applications for the SAP R/3 system, a widely-installed business application subsystem. Object-oriented programming is the recent version of ABAP Objects. ABAP Objects uses a single inheritance model and full support for object features such as encapsulation, polymorphism, and persistence.

Types of ABAP programs

An ABAP program is either an executable unit or a library, which provides reusable code to other programs and is not independently executable.

ABAP distinguishes two types of executable programs:

• Reports
• Module pools

Reports follow a relatively simple programming model whereby a user optionally enters a set of parameters and the program then uses the input parameters to produce a report in the form of an interactive list.

Module pools define more complex patterns of user interaction using a collection of screens. The term ‘screen’ refers to the actual, physical image that the user sees.

The non-executable program types are

• Include modules – gets included at generation time into the calling unit.
• Subroutine pools – contain ABAP subroutines
• Function groups – libraries of self-contained function modules
• Object classes – define a set of methods and attributes
• Interfaces – contain ‘empty’ method definitions, for which any class implementing the interface must provide explicit code
• Type pools – define collections of data types and constants