ABAP - (Advanced Business Application Programming)

A high-level, COBOL-like programming language used to develop SAP applications.

Originally a report generator language for SAP's R/2 mainframe platform, ABAP has
been widely used to develop R/3 (SAP ERP) applications. It is also used in conjunction
with Java for programming SAP's NetWeaver Application Server, a foundation product
for SAP applications. See R/3 and SAP Business Suite.

ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming, originally Allgemeiner Berichts-

Aufbereitungs-Prozessor, German for "general report creation processor"), pronounced
as 'ah-bop', is a high-level programming language created by the German software
company SAP. It is currently positioned, alongside the more recently introduced Java,
as the language for programming the SAP Application Server, part of its
NetWeaverplatform for building business applications. The syntax of ABAP is somewhat
similar to COBOL.

INTRODUCTION

ABAP is one of the many application-specific fourth-generation languages (4GLs) first

developed in the 1980s. It was originally the report language for SAP R/2, a platform
that enabled large corporations to build mainframe business applications for materials
management and financial and management accounting.

ABAP used to be an abbreviation of Allgemeiner Berichtsaufbereitungsprozessor, the

German meaning of "generic report preparation processor" , but was later renamed to
Advanced Business Application Programming. ABAP was one of the first languages to
include the concept of Logical Databases (LDBs), which provides a high level of
abstraction from the basic database level(s).

The ABAP programming language was originally used by developers to develop the
SAP R/3 platform. It was also intended to be used by SAP customers to enhance SAP
applications – customers can develop custom reports and interfaces with ABAP
programming. The language is fairly easy to learn for programmers but it is not a tool for
direct use by non-programmers. Good programming skills, including knowledge of
relational database design and preferably also of object-oriented concepts, are required
to create ABAP programs.

ABAP remains the language for creating programs for the client-server R/3 system,
which SAP first released in 1992. As computer hardware evolved through the 1990s,
more and more of SAP's applications and systems were written in ABAP. By 2001, all
but the most basic functions were written in ABAP. In 1999, SAP released an object-
oriented extension to ABAP called ABAP Objects, along with R/3 release 4.6.