Old ABAPer ... new tricks

[mike_reader3]

Hello everyone,

As an ABAPer for the last 15 years and just finishing TechEd, there are lots of new paths out there for development, I was wondering what the focus should be for the "grey hairs" of us out there who are hanging on dearly to SE80.

Thanks, Mike

[albanleong]

Well, if you're still solely only focused on being in SE80 (SAP GUI), then my suggestion would be to at least start getting used to using Eclipse ADT and hopefully you're on Suite-on-HANA / S/4HANA so that you can get involved in CDS development and OData which both still utilizes a lot of ABAP skills but you'll be learning new and exciting things like Annotations on CDS, SQLScript (AMDP), SEGW and/or Service Definition/Bindings...

In short, look up ABAP RESTful Application Programming (RAP) and I think you'll probably like it.

[matt]

Not just the new stuff, but old style ABAP programming is so much quicker and easier in Eclipse. One very nice feature is there is local versioning - so if you go down a blind alley, you can recover where you were an hour ago.

[juan_suros]

I will also put in a good word for CDS view development using the SAP add-ons to Eclipse. They are an excellent way to push processing down into HANA.

In the meantime, SAP has not decided to rewrite the core libraries. Concentrate on ABAP support of: (1) customizing the data management transactions, (2) uploads into SAP, and (3) batch processing of orders. Fiori is an expensive resource hog, for now, that concentrates on reporting and workflow rather than routine data entry. The cloud stuff is concentrating on replacing the PI/PO world.

If you are a greyhair like myself, we will probably retire before SAP replaces enough of the core libraries to replace us.

[wolfgang_woehrle]

Hi Mike

Thank you for your question.

I am sure you heard about ABAP Development Tools on TechEd 2022. It is also called ADT or ABAP in Eclipse.

ABAP Development Tools is SAP’s state-of-the-art IDE for ABAP development on the open Eclipse platform. Please see here:

• a blog from our CPO about the future technologies
• a blog about ADT's 10 years anniversary in 2022

Do you want to see a compare what is provided in ADT in comparison to the SE80? I kindly ask you to see my FAQs regarding SE80 vs. ADT . I hope I could make you a bit curious about ADT and its modern features.

Kind regards,

Wolfgang

[matt]

I've been developing in ADT for years. But just looked at the FAQs and learned something new!