When it comes to ABAP development, there are plenty of interesting aspects that need to be taken into consideration. The ABAP development tools for SAP Net Weaver are SAP’s high-tech IDE on the Eclipse platform. Not only that these tools increase the productivity of the developers by providing them with an excellent opportunity to undertake their development tasks in a convenient ABAP environment, but they also enable the developers to greatly benefit from the enhanced flexibility, usability, and speed of the advanced Eclipse environment.
The ABAP development tools integrate SAP’s strong ABAP server capabilities such as efficient full cycle management, complete integration, high quality troubleshooting and testing tools with the great Eclipse user-interface. Moreover, these development tools offer easier integration with other sophisticated development tools on open Eclipse platform.
The ABAP development tools primarily focus on three domains: Product, Platform, and API.
- Product -a brand new experience related to ABAP development on top of Eclipse platform.
- Platform -an open Eclipse platform for developing new, latest tools.
- API – a set of open API’s that developers can utilize to create new custom tools for the ABAP environment. The API’s are independent of the language and platform.
The general concept of ABAP is to offer one eclipse client, and has the ability to connect to a number of backend systems. The RFC/ REST based protocol is normally used to establish the connection. The client offers an array of development tools like the project explorer for search views and system browsing. Moreover, editors are available for every development object that may include classes, modules, reports, functions, etc. The development architecture is server-based. What this means is that the development objects are only stored on the backend system and services such as search, and syntax check run on the backend.
One of the major benefits of using Eclipse as the new platform is the fact that it offers great deal of openness to new tools and features through the Eclipse plug-in platform. The new ABAP development architecture also provides these plug-in facilities on ABAP backend.
Therefore, by making use of the plug-in features on the frontend and ABAP development architecture on the backend, it becomes possible to provide new tools to the ABAP development environment. These tools will have the capability to offer sophisticated ABAP features like transport, activation, where used list, etc. coupled with advanced Eclipse UI and integration facilities in an integrated development environment. Following are some of the key features:
- Highly flexible, and customizable UI
- Display and Edit features for multiple ABAP objects
- Sophisticated Source code Editing
- Fast search and efficient navigation abilities
The ABAP development tools integrate perfectly with SAP HANA Studio by ensuring an efficient application development on top of HANA. The ABAP development tools significantly enhance ABAP developer efficiency and productivity through high-tech Eclipse UI and flexibility. They also enable cross-platform development through the integration of ABAP and non-ABAP development resources into one single Eclipse-based IDE. With that said, the ABAP development tools for SAP Net Wear offer a number of benefits to the developer, thereby ensuring increased productivity and performance.