Definition

ABAP is the acronym for Advanced Business Application Programming. Initially the word ABAP was a short form of German words Allgemeiner Berichts-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor, which meant “general report creation processor”.

ABAP is a high level programming language that has been developed by SAP, which is a leader in software industry. It runs head to head with Java and is used for the programming of the application server of SAP.

History of ABAP

The computing field has seen a number of fourth generation application specific languages, ABAP is also one of these languages. It was first created in the era of 1980s. At the time of its initial development ABAP was used as the report language for the R/2 platform of SAP. It was a tool that tool that facilitated organizations in the development of mainframe business application for financial management, material management, and management accounting.

The most striking and unique feature of ABAP was the fact that it was the first language that made use of the Logical Databases (LDBs) concept. This enabled the language to have higher level of abstraction as compared to languages that use basic database levels.

The use of this programming language was also made available in the development of R/3 platform of SAP. The language was also to be used by the customers of SAP for the purpose of enhancement of the applications that they have developed. Customers were provided with an ability to use ABAP programming for the development of interfaces as well as custom reports. The language aimed at catering to the highly technical customers that had an experience of professional programming and computing.

In the present era also, ABAP is used as the primary language that is deployed for the creation of programs for R/3 system client-server, which was first released in the year 1992 by SAP. With the evolution and development of computer hardware and software since 1990s, ABAP was used for the purpose of writing a large number of systems and applications of SAP. By the year 2001, this language was used to write almost all the functions of SAP, except for the most basic ones.

In the year 1999, ABAP Objects, which was an object oriented extension of ABAP, was released by SAP to further increase the functionality of the language. This was accompanied by release 4.6 of R/3. NetWeaver, which is the current development platform for SAP, also extends support for ABAP as well as Java.

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