I started working for SAP about 4 years ago as a student of the university of cooperative education in Mannheim. In the first month we had a couple of trainings at SAP. One of them was the famous BC400. This course is about the basics of SAP’s own programming language called ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming). The language is designed for writing business applications, which means, that it does not include support for any cool 3D rendering or 7.1 sound stuff but just makes it very easy to retrieve data from the backend data base and publish it on a UI.
It took some time for me to start liking ABAP, as the development tools (at least at that time) were really a pain in the a**. It did (and does) have some very cool features like forward navigation, which basically lets you double click on any variable, method, function or other dev object to navigate to the respective underlying code. But especially the source code editor was relict from 20 years ago: No code completion, no code folding, even no syntax highlighting.
In the last four years, this has already improved a lot. Beside code completion, folding and syntax highlighting, even the debugger was greatly enhanced. Nevertheless the ABAP Development Workbench (more often referred to as se80 – its transaction code), somehow still feels not like Visual Studio, Netbeans or Eclipse, as it is still lacking a certain degree of flexibility.
As SAP has provided a large amount of addons/plugins for Eclipse in the last years for e.g. developing business applications in Java, I was always wondering why the ABAP IDE was not ported to Eclipse as well. Seems that some (many?) other people thought the same; at this year’s SAP TechEd in Munich, the new ABAP Eclipse IDE was announced during Demo Jam. It is still just a project without a publish date, but looks like SAP is finally going to provide a competitive IDE for ABAP developers!
Have a look at the demo jam recording to see a presentation about it. (You can jump to the very end, if you are not interested into the other great demos.) Furthermore, you can find a screencast here (without audio), which is just showing off the look and feel.
Hey Christian
Thank you very much for the post – you gave me hope!!
> Seems that some (many?) other people thought the same
- damn right! … I came to SAP-Walldorf after 3 years of using eclipse,
my first reaction to se80 was something like “give me a bucket – I can throwout anytime” or “Mama, can I pleeeze go back home?”
- So are there any more news about when/whether this Plug-in will be available in SAP?
Wishing you a pleasant day,
Alex
After the astonishing demo, I did a little bit of research and found out that there already is a commercial ABAP plugin for Eclipse.
I don’t know whether the version from the DemoJam guys differs from it in functionality. I haven’t heard anything about the project since the session.