The A4E mission - aka "It's good enough"

[Former Member]

The Mission (or why mankind needs more features to explore)

First time I got in touch with computer hardware / software as a child was the undercover usage of the incredible expensive C64 of my older brother 😉

Later, we switched to Amiga and had all we need to code assembler and have fun for a long time. It was good enough.

In business life as software engineer, we work with C on Unix within IBM3151/VT100 terminals and

• a shell
• a vi editor
• a build environment (make/compile/link/deploy)
• a software version management (CVS)
• a runtime environment (debug/profile/trace)

Again, it was good enough to solve the business requirements.

Today, SE80 with nice frontend editor and useful embedded tools are available for ABAP.

Is it finally good enough now ?

To answer that question, I think it's a matter of efficiency. Or in other words: "How many people are you (as a developer) able to make happy per time unit ?"

As mankind (at least in the capitalistic parts of the world) are (by definition) never efficient enough, I think the question is answered quite fast.

After Java came up and SAP changes some of its own tools (like MaxDB Studio) to Eclipse framework, it was worth to have a look on it. The A4E was shown at TechEd in the past and I tried to get a NW ABAP backend in our environment which was new enough to support A4E.

With NW 7.4 everything matches better together and setup/usage is simple enough.

So let's start with updating the ABAP4Eclipse package and find "the mission" inside Eclipse.

Here are the results:

1. The idea of "training included" software (e.g. with gamification parts) is nice.
   Some smartphone OS explains the usage of itself during the initial usage
   
   
2. A error was detected:
   It seems that generating a ABAP Class Type Hirarchie of a local class leads to endless loop in Eclipse. The only way to exit was kill Eclipse and restart.
3. A backend dump occurred during refactoring
   
   
   
4. I think the explicit feature explorer is the first step on a road to software with more "itelligent training included"
   Imagine if software could analyze your daily usage (like Google now) and provides you suggestions matching to your behaviour of usage,
   like ... "someone permanently types in the same code patterns again and again" -> a suggestion to optimize (code completition or patterns) could be made.
   I like the concept of http://scn.sap.com/community/gamification It has the potential to drive a new way of understanding software without dedicated training
   
   
5. I'm unamazed from Eclipse (at all). Sorry, but that's my personal opinion. There are many pros and cons.

But finally, everybody has to decide itself, how efficienty can be increased in daily work.