Year review 2024

Table of contents

• Focus
• Highlights
• Landing Page
• Tools
• Events
• Performance
• Internal
• Google
• Social Media
• Outlook
• Thank you

This year there is mainly a review of SAP topics, which is why you will find the review in the ABAP category for the first time. As always, we would like to go into the topics, but also touch on performance and social media. The figures shown refer to the period January 1st - December 15th, 2024.

 

Focus

The focus this year was primarily on the topic of ABAP Cloud, as this is where we have gained the most experience. Furthermore, all common topics have been touched on so far. In total, we have written and published 95 articles, which are spread across the various areas.

 

A new area has been created, "ABAP in Practice" is intended to look at common examples of development and explain them step by step. With this series, we want to take a closer look at problems and code from practice.

In total, there are now more than 320 articles on the blog that cover the topics of Modern ABAP, ABAP Unit, Core Data Service, ABAP Development Tools, BTP and ABAP Cloud. To help you keep track of the topics, there is a compact link collection by topic that is automatically updated.

 

Highlights

What were the highlights this year? Let's take a look at various areas that were spread over the year.

 

Landing Page

This year we revised the Landing Page for SAP in order to cover all relevant topics at a glance and to get the necessary information and summaries. The page has grown significantly over the course of the year, especially because of the many tools that we have made available...

 

Tools

No tools in ABAP, but tools that are intended to support the ABAP developer. Which features actually work on which backend release or which features can I use after the upgrade? The ABAP Feature Matrix and the ABAP Learning Matrix are designed to help developers stay up to date and access current features.

ABAP Cloud relies heavily on Core Data Services and does not use the old tables in the data model. But how do you get the new Core Data Services and how can you map the old fields to the database in a meaningful way? The CDS Field Mapping was made available for this purpose to support the transformation. The Select Converter is designed to help convert SELECT statements automatically. The tool is still under development, as SELECT statements can be complex and require a lot of logic.

If you want to tackle the topic of translation in the ABAP Cloud environment, you will most likely quickly be confronted with XLIFF files. To translate these, you need the Translation Hub, an external tool, or you can use our translator. The translator is designed to help you translate texts quickly and clearly.

 

Events

We were also active at various DSAG, SAP and Community events and gave various presentations. We gained a lot of experience and met a lot of new people. You can find out more about this in the personal review.

 

Performance

In this section we look at the reach, click numbers and subscriptions. We currently see internal figures for views and external figures via Google search.

 

Internal

When it comes to performance, we look at the TOP 10 articles of the year. We were able to pique your curiosity with a RAP topic. 

 

By far the most popular topic is Deep Entity in Actions, a way to transfer and manage deep structures via API. This is followed by articles from the ABAP Cloud area, such as the topic of Table Maintenance (SM30) or Jobs (SM36/SM37). ABAP code in the ABAP RESTful Programming Model always seems to be a big topic and with the Deep Dive on the Custom Entity, there was even more to read about it. When creating the ABAP Feature Matrix, the topic of new RETURN also came into focus.

The article for the Tool Bridge had caught SAP's attention and was listed in the Developer News. Here you can go step by step through setting up the bridge in the ABAP Development Tools. A later article on the topic of Fiori development for ABAP developers was also read very frequently. How do you actually migrate a report to an application job? There was an article on this in the ABAP Cloud section. Apparently still relatively unknown is parallel processing in the object-oriented variant, which you can also use in ABAP Cloud. The final part is a RAP example app on the topic of translation of texts.

 

Google

Google search is still a relevant metric for visibility and reach, even though more and more new search engines have come onto the market in recent years. There was a drop in searches in the middle of the year, but that changed again towards the end of the year.

 

In contrast to the end of 2022, the numbers on Google have doubled, but also because there is much more content to search for and Software-Heroes is slowly becoming a part of the community.

 

Social Media

At the end of last year we started on various social media channels and shared our content there. In addition to LinkedIn, X and Mastodon were also added, and over the course of the year Bluesky was also launched as part of the big SAP community wave. Basically, we post the same content there as on any other channel, perhaps with minor differences.

 

Overall, growth seems to be limited primarily to the blog and LinkedIn. After the first year of social media and "advertising" for the articles, the reach of the articles has increased significantly. Basically, marketing works, but it also takes up a lot of time and space. At least we are happy when more people read our articles and take the knowledge they contain with them.

 

Outlook

What will happen next year? Always a good question. Basically, we still have a lot of topics in the backlog that we want to write about and that we want to look at in more detail. In addition, we will go with the flow of news and information to report on current topics in the SAP area. Next year will be exciting for you again.

 

Thank you

We would also like to thank the community for the exciting questions this year. We were able to answer some questions with articles, and other questions we were able to answer personally. We also received a lot of feedback, for which we would like to thank you.