Abap in the S/4 Hana Era

The hype surrounding fourth-generation programming languages, known as 4GL (Generation Language) for short, lasted from around the mid-1980s until well into the second half of the 1990s.

The main aim was to support developers in the rapid creation of complete applications in the long term.

Developed with a number of open and proprietary 4GLs, numerous applications saw the light of day - and served as the basis or development platform for standard software systems, such as the Walldorf success SAP R/3.

Around the mid-1990s, SAP's approach was to establish Abap (Advanced Business Application Programming) as a general development basis and 4GL on the market. The Abap Workbench was promoted at the time.

A number of R/3 customers and SAP partners had already started to develop a wide variety of applications with the SAP Workbench. Some as quasi stand-alone systems, others as integrated R/3 components.

At the same time, Abap was increasingly used by SAP customers to create or develop R/3 enhancements according to a wide variety of company requirements (keyword: intellectual property), which is still the case today.

Abap, initially referred to as the "General Report Preparation Processor", has changed and evolved over the years. SAP has always paid attention to compatibility, even when object-oriented programming elements (and models) were introduced.

An important milestone was reached at the beginning of the 1990s, for example, when the Walldorf-based software group launched NetWeaver, offering a Java runtime and programming environment alongside Abap.

Another one: For just over four years, SAP has been offering an Abap development environment based on Eclipse, an open source platform.

There have been a number of Abap development stages over time. However, listing them all here would go beyond the scope of this article.

In any case, it is worth mentioning that Abap is based on syntax elements of the Cobol programming language.

SAP will certainly align Abap more stringently to Hana use in one way or another or adapt it accordingly.

Standard here, long-lasting custom code there

One can only guess how many lines of code or small and large applications/application add-ons have ever been developed around the globe using the proprietary Abap programming language.

In any case, they run into the billions. And abap custom code is long-lived, very long-lived.

Many SAP users with Abap developments as well as a number of SAP partners who have developed additional or industry solutions based on Abap are currently asking themselves these questions:

• Can Abap code also be used in the S/4 Hana era?
• What needs to be done to make the best possible use of Abap programs in S/4?

As is well known, S/4 represents a new generation of the Business Suite based on a new technology. On the one hand, the range of functions is constantly changing, as seen in the current major release 1610 (compared to 1511).

On the other hand, SAP is transferring numerous functions to the standard. Various transactions are also being combined.

Regardless of this, Abap or custom code can generally also be used in S/4. However, the Abap code must be analyzed to determine whether it is compatible with the existing and future program parts of S/4 and the use of Hana.

It is advisable to create a kind of "heat map" here, which provides information on which objects access which tables, for example, or to check which processes and data have been simplified and which can or must be simplified.

Or: which programs work in which transactions, for reasons of identification/traceability.

Smartshift's tools are also able to perform such analyses - as a basis for relevant and sustainable code optimizations.