Could there be ABAP beginner-level tutorials using SAP-GUI instead of Eclipse?

[BaerbelWinkler]

Hi Folks,

after reading oddss's blog post about and working through the new Community tutorial, I poked around the tutorials a bit more, especially the ones for beginner level ABAP Workbench. One thing I noticed, is that they all are based on utilising Eclipse and I'm wondering if at least some of the really basic tutorials like "Learn about the ABAP Data Dictionary" or "Exploring the ABAP Repository" could also be made available in versions utilising SAP GUI instead?

Here is the reason why I'm asking this:

Every once in a while I mentor students who spend a couple of days in our development/basis team as part of working towards e.g. their masters degree in business informatics. They have access to our development or sandbox systems via SAP GUI but will not have ABAP for Eclipse on their eduction-department issued laptops. I have to admit that we also don't use Eclipse all that much and don't yet have a process to have it centrally installed on developer laptops/PCs.

The students don't yet know anything about ABAP development and usually not much about SAP in general either (depending on which other departments they already visited before staying with us). Some of the tutorials would nonetheless make quite nice activities for them during their usually short stints with us. But, having the tutorials based on Eclipse is a bit of a showstopper to actually make use of them as the students most likely will already have moved on by the time we got Eclipse up and running on their laptops. It would also be a bit of "overkill" as they'll move on to other departments where they no longer have the need for Eclipse.

Do others perhaps have comparable situations so that it could actually be worthwhile to offer SAP GUI based versions for some of the tutorials?

Cheers

Bärbel

[craigcmehil]

Currently the tutorials are based off of freely available systems via trial accounts or free developer licenses. I've been out of the ABAP world for a bit longer than I ever like to admit but I would assume(?) that the freely downloadable 7.x systems (https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/#abap) are the only versions currently available. To be honest those I've only ever worked with in regards using Eclipse because of all the other benefits that come with the tool set.

Pinging, riley.rainey who leads our Evangelism team and karl.kessler and jens.weiler who have responsibility for ABAP PaaS, perhaps they might be able to chime in.

[Jelena_Perfiljeva · Accepted solution]

Yes, it could be useful. It will be some time until Eclipse and the whole ABAP in Cloud will be widely adopted in reality and render SAP GUI obsolete not just on paper.

If I understand correctly, you're simply looking for a tutorial that would explain how to use the tool(s) you already have, not necessarily to show someone what's latest and greatest . Both Eclipse and SAP GUI are used by SAP customers (and will be at least for several years, I expect), so I don't see why we can't have both.

We might also get some interns and it'd be nice just to give them a link rather than our team explaining the basics. We still use SAP GUI too. Personally, I don't even like Eclipse (so sue me! 🙂 ). Some teammates were interested in it but then something didn't work and no one had a chance to follow up on that. For an ABAP consultant not knowing how to use SE11 and SE80 in SAP GUI would be a disadvantage IMHO. SAPScript still exists too. Everyone hates it but someone needs to know what to do with it. It's just reality.

I'm guessing the answer to your question is simply that SAP wouldn't want to invest in such tutorial, so it'd have to be rather a community effort.

[BaerbelWinkler · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your feedback, Jelena! I have now started to create SAP GUI versions of some of the beginner level tutorials related to the ABAP workbench. The tutorials serve as a neat guideline of the steps entailed and I mostly need to tweak the text while translating it into German and capture screenshots as I go along.

I'll have the students work through the tutorials in a sandbox system, so whatever they create won't clutter our actual development systems.

Cheers

Bärbel

[pokrakam]

Hi Bärbel,

I've given up on Q&A but just had to chime in on this one. The main reason is that it's just precisely the scenario where you should use Eclipse.

1. Eclipse is easy to install. There's no effort "to get it up and running", or "overkill". The installer is optional, if your environment allows running executables (many I've worked at do) then just download the zip version, unzip, run.
2. Eclipse is not just for SAP development. You'll be set up for Javascript, Java, HTML, XML and a plethora of other things. Also a lot other non-development functionality is available via Eclipse such as UML and BPMN Modeling tools, over 1000 plugins are available at https://marketplace.eclipse.org Why lock a student out of all people into a dead end UI?
3. SAPGUI is a "walled garden". If a student will ever use any other IDE platform, they will use something similar to Eclipse. SAP Web IDE, XCode and Visual Studio all use similar development paradigms. When learning to drive, starting out with a forklift is only useful if you're ever going to drive around warehouses. Yes it may do one or two things that a car can't, but I guarantee learning to drive in a car will open up more possibilities.

Go to the package download at https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/ and download the zip for your environment. The packages are just the core Eclipse packaged together with pre-installed plugins. I recommend "Eclipse IDE for JavaScript and Web Developers" as it's one of the smaller ones and has some most generally useful components.

Unzip somewhere, double-click on eclipse.exe to run, and that's it to get eclipse running.

To install ADT, go to Help -> Install new Software, enter https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/photon as your source and install the ABAP components. Total time from downloading Eclipse to to having ADT installed is <10 minutes. Store that image somewhere and just copy it onto any laptop that needs it.

Aside from that it should be easy to justify why it MUST be part of the developer software setup and get your IT people to include it. It is a prerequisite for any SAP developer, as clearly stated by SAP. Simple, no arguments. It was announced in 2014 as their primary IDE for ABAP.

Eclipse also uses Workspaces, meaning your configuration, the systems you connect to and folders/sources/projects you use are all inside or referenced by your workspace. This can be on a network drive, so no need to clutter up temporary machines with people's stuff either.

Spend some time with it, understand how it works (Eclipse, not ADT), and you'll see it's not such a big deal. Yes it's not the ultimate IDE out there, they've sacrificed a bit of 'slickness' to be able to include a wide range of capabilities. But that's precisely why SAP was able to build such a capable ABAP plugin for it.

Oh and by the way, I know of developers that still like to use SE38/24, but do so inside Eclipse, just because it's convenient to have different sessions and transactions open in tabs. Go figure 😉

[BaerbelWinkler]

mike.pokraka

Hi Mike,

thanks for your detailed response! I get your points and they of course make sense for people doing (or going to do) actual development work. My "use-case" is somewhat special: as mentioned, the majority of the students we get and who then perhaps stay for 1 to 3 days at most, will not do development work where they need a tool like Eclipse. Explaining some technical underpinnings (aka a "Hello World" program with some additional lines of code to read some data based on selection-screen input), or having them do some look ups in the workbench is really all that needs to happen.

Cheers

Bärbel

[pokrakam]

Hi Bärbel,

I don't get why it's complicated or not suitable for your use case. It's an extra minute's effort to copy a preconfigured setup over, and I think there's a _very_ strong argument for getting it included into a standard developer profile.

From a development perspective I see no difference, you can write exactly the same HelloWorld program just as quick, and the ADT SQL Console is an excellent tool to learn SQL.

Or else why not go in a different direction instead, maybe have them do a cloud-based app? Or an OData Service? No extra software required.

[BaerbelWinkler]

mike.pokraka

Hi Mike,

the thing is that in most cases they are not going to need any actual (ABAP) programming skills for their studies. It's just finding their way around and understanding very superficially how the ABAP-workbench and the data dictionary work which I try to show them. That F1 and double-click (in the GUI!) are very helpful to get some information or to dig a level deeper. Most of the interactions they have with the ERP-SAP systems during their initial 4 to 6 weeks in our process teams happen via SAP GUI. Adding Eclipse to the mix at this early stage will just add one more - and in my view unnecessary - layer of complexity for them to come to grips with. Not an easy ask of them, esp. if - due to the scheduling of their stay in our department - they sometimes hadn't had any close encounters with an SAP-system before. Because they are business-process oriented most don't have much if any programming experience at all.

Once they complete their master degree, they usually end up in one of the business process teams where they'll work with the various GUI-transactions used in the ERP-modules (based on NW 750 with EHP8 - although none of those are active AFAIK). It'll then come in handy, if they can at least somewhat interpret ABAP code, understand the DDIC-elements, don't freak out when they jump into debugging or look at a dump in ST22. But, they won't need any active ABAP-programming skills for this.

Cheers

Bärbel

[Jelena_Perfiljeva]

I see your point, Mike, and don't disagree except the more accurate analogy I think would be between the cars with manual and automatic transmission (forklift has a different purpose than a car). I learned to drive with manual but then in reality have not driven it more than a few times. Have not driven any since 2000 and won't do so voluntarily. 🙂 But I still know how to do it. These days the kids don't know what it is, they're learning to drive automatic.

I think OP was not about what's the most convenient car to drive but rather "I have a working stick shift car in my driveway and would like to show someone how to use it" yet the answers are more like "OMG, buy a new car already!" 🙂 Not denying new car would be awesome but the old one still works.

[pokrakam]

Hi Jelena,

Manual transmission was the first analogy that came to mind, but I deliberately steered away from it (bad pun).

I did not intend to suggest it's old or endangered. As you rightly say, a forklift has a different purpose. As does SAPGUI. Eclipse is a general purpose platform and will work with many languages and packages (cars/roads), including SAP. But SAPGUI has a specific purpose to work with SAP (forklift/warehouse). Not a perfect example, but I am not writing a book here 🙂

As an aside bit of fun: it was while looking for info about the Papyrus plugin that I came across this little gem on their website: LEGO car factory. (I think I posted it on here somewhere before)

[karl_kessler]

Hi Bärbel,

(un)fortunately, there are no tutorials available for SE80. The reason is that we have invested heavily in the ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse (ADT) over the last couple of years. Many of the new features (e.g. core data services) are only available in Eclipse. Our new ABAP PaaS (product name: SAP Cloud Platform ABAP Environment) can only be accessed via ADT since SAP GUI is and will never be supported. The installation of ADT is fairly simple. Craig already shared the tools URL in his comment above. This could be done by the students themselves as an initial exercise.
I add a link to the latest on-premise download, see ABAP 7.52 Developer Edition.

Best regards,
Karl

[BaerbelWinkler]

karl.kessler

Thanks for your feedback, Karl!

This unfortunately means, that the tutorials will not really be usable for what I had in mind. The students don't have permission/authorisation to download and install software on their issued laptops as these get passed from student to student and would clutter up quickly if these restrictions were not in place. In addition we also don't yet make use of new features like CDS-views, so are still mostly using SAP GUI with SE80 & Co.

It also feels like "overkill" to start out with such an installation for a short stint by the students in our group which is mainly there to give them a look at what's "under the hood" of an SAP-system. Their main focus is on the business processes and chances that (m)any of them end up doing actual development work is close to zero.

I'll give this some thought and perhaps have one of the students "rewrite" the tutorials for SE80 for future internal use.

Cheers

Bärbel

[Florian]

Hi Bärbel,

I have the complete installation on my usb-stick to use my own settings whereever I go. MAybe it could be something you can take with into the company. A USB-Stick with 16 GB is way enough... MAybe you can give it with the installation as a gift for being at you company 🙂

And Eclipse isn't a installation... it's a standalone running program. So no need to ask the internal IT *haha*

[BaerbelWinkler]

*haha* indeed, FLorian! We are not even supposed to use USB-sticks on our company laptops/PCs, let alone install/copy any unauthorized software. When I officially "installed" Eclipse on my laptop a while ago I needed to get temporary admin-rights for "my" laptop as some stuff or other (JAVA perhaps?) did need to be installed/updated in order to make it run. So, it's not quite as easy/straightforward as it may look, some of which might be due to our IT-internal processes.

Cheers

Bärbel

[Florian]

Hi bärbel,

maybe there is a need for a broader discussion between the companies and SAP what is needed for a developer nowadays. It can't be the solution, that we as developers cannot use all things SAP want us to use because of internal limitations of basis-guys who aren't able to have this view on things we do.

And of course it can't be our job to explain the need of a tool-installation. (Not that I haven't gone through this process either:-))