ABAP - Skills of the future
As an ABAP developer, what skills will you need in the future and what can you learn from topics today? In this article we will show you where the journey is going.
Table of contents
SAP and its software products are constantly evolving. In addition to HANA and the new on-premise releases, the cloud is also increasingly coming to the fore. And as you have already noticed from our series about Eclipse, SAP is also moving further and further away from the SAP GUI. The successor technology has been in the starting blocks for a long time and has been partially overtaken by even newer technologies.
The pillars
Today's article is about the pillars of skills, how SAP imagines the ABAP developers of the future and which skills you can already acquire today. To do this, we want to take a look at the graphic that schematically shows and roughly describes the pillars and then goes into the individual points in more detail.
User Experience
This is about the focus on the end user and user of the applications you make available. The focus will be more and more on the Fiori Launchpad and the apps you create for it. This means that SAP Fiori and app development are in great demand here.
But the new programming model "RAP" (ABAP RESTful Programming Model) will also be in great demand, because with it you can quickly provide interfaces and Firoi apps on-premise, but above all in the cloud.
Utilize HANA capabilities
Use the strengths of the new HANA database and the possibilities that SAP makes available to you. This involves pure ABAP core development and the efficient development of CDS (Core Data Services) and the use of code pushdown to get the maximum performance out of the system. Data Services has been around for a while, do you already know the most important things to consider?
A HANA database should actually be very fast, but even with poorly developed data access, a HANA system can fail and become slow. Such errors should be avoided in the future and building a virtual data model should not give you any headaches.
Efficient development
You should be able to master clean and effective development today. The development of classes and interfaces should be in your blood. If you haven't already, then you should start learning this. Other methods and techniques in this area are:
- Object-oriented development
- ABAP unit tests
- TDD (test driven development)
- Eclipse / Web IDE
- Test of OData Services
- abapGit
- Security of development (inside and outside of the system)
Do you already know everything on our list? We are planning more series on many of these topics in the future to definitely get you up to date. If you would like to find out more about a topic, just contact us and let us know.
Cloud
The cloud strategy has been driven by SAP for a number of years, but SAP's opinion has changed somewhat over the years. In the beginning, the slogans "Everything towards the cloud" were very widespread, as opinions quickly changed towards "Cloud, but not only". For you as a developer, this means that the cloud will still remain an important component, especially in terms of connection and interaction with the on-premise systems.
The following topics would be particularly important/relevant:
- Extensions in the cloud or side-by-side scenarios
- Steampunk
- Whitelisted APIs
- Cloud infrastructure
Conclusion
There will hardly be any more pure ABAP developers in the future. You need to evolve in additional technology stacks and understand the general frameworks and functionality. The cloud and how communication works with it is also becoming increasingly important. In any case, there are many new technologies waiting, but you can already see and try them out today.
