15 Facts About ABAP

ABAP is a high-level programming language created by the German software company SAP SE.

ABAP is one of the many application-specific fourth-generation languages first developed in the 1980s.

ABAP used to be an abbreviation of Allgemeiner Berichts-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor, German for "generic report preparation processor", but was later renamed to the English Advanced Business Application Programming.

ABAP was one of the first languages to include the concept of Logical Databases, which provides a high level of abstraction from the basic database level, which supports every platform, language and units.

ABAP has an abstraction between the business applications, the operating system and database.

Related searches

ABAP programs execute under the control of the runtime system, which is part of the SAP kernel.

The runtime system is responsible for processing ABAP statements, controlling the flow logic of screens and responding to events ; in this respect it can be seen as a Virtual Machine comparable with the Java VM.

ABAP programs are created and undergo first testing in the development system.

Transactions can be invoked programmatically by means of the ABAP statements CALL TRANSACTION and LEAVE TO TRANSACTION.

ABAP Workbench is part of the ABAP system and is accessed via SAP GUI.

ABAP Dictionary contains all metadata about the data in the SAP system.

All ABAP variables have to be explicitly declared in order to be used.

ABAP CDS makes it possible to define semantic data models on the central database of the application server.

The entities of these models provide enhanced access functions when compared with existing database tables and views defined in ABAP Dictionary, making it possible to optimize Open SQL-based applications.

The main difference with these languages is that ABAP provides a collection of statements to easily access and manipulate the contents of internal tables.