ABAP Tools - Workbench
The ABAP Workbench was the most important tool for the ABAP developer for many years, today we will show you a little bit history of tools.
Table of contents
The ABAP Workbench is still the most important environment for ABAP development, but will continue to be replaced by Eclipse and the ADTs over the next few years. Nevertheless, we want to show you a few nice features that still bring you a lot of benefits und take a dive through the history.
Single transactions
Today, every senior ABAP developer knows first and foremost the individual transactions that have existed for a long time, for each type of object. These individual programs date from the early days of the system. As usual in SAP, navigation takes place via the transaction code or the favorites. Here are the most common transactions:
- SE38 - Programs
- SE37 - Function modules
- SE11 - Dictionary
- SE24 - Classes and interfaces
- SE91 - Message classes
- SE93 - Transactions
And there are many more that you need for various tasks. However, the transactions are the most important for the creation of simple reports and frameworks.
SE80
The development of the SE80, the object navigator, was the first innovation to make all important parts accessible to the developer in one place. For the most part, this is just a kind of navigation that summarizes and lists the object and integrates the individual transactions.
The transaction was the first "modern" application for developing ABAP reports and frameworks, since it made the navigation to other programs unnecessary and you had everything in one place, which could increase the development speed considerably. For many years the SE80 was also the standard in development and most developers master their tool while they are asleep.
Development enhancement
The language ABAP then reached its peak for a long time and hardly any new features or improvements followed, apart from ABAP Objects.
With the development of HANA and the in-memory databases, numerous new technologies followed, such as:
- SAP Fiori/UI5
- Core Data Services (CDS)
- SAP Cloud Platform (SCP)
- New ABAP (ABAP/4)
All of these developments caused a change in the way of thinking about building applications and also raised the question of whether the SE80 and its tools would be the right choice for the future.
ADT
The ABAP Development Tools are actually not really a new tool, but a plugin for Eclipse known by JAVA developers that is used for development. The plugin already offers a wide range of tools that you can use to support your daily work. And if a tool or transaction should not be available or supported, a SAP GUI window opens in Eclipse and you can continue working there without switching the tool.
The ADTs are in constant development and new features will appear every three months to replace old parts of the GUI development and improve the tools for ABAP.
Conclusion
In future articles we will take a closer look at this development and show you a few advantages and disadvantages and other features for both worlds. The development is not yet complete and you can look forward to many new and exciting topics from SAP.
