Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP)

Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) ist eine 4GL-anwendungsspezifische Programmiersprache, die in den 1980er Jahren von der deutschen Softwarefirma SAP entwickelt wurde. Die Syntax von ABAP ähnelt COBOL. ABAP war und bleibt die Programmiersprache für die Entwicklung und Modifikation von SAP-Anwendungen.

The widespread R / 3 system was first released by SAP in 1992 and developed in ABAP.
1999 hat SAP eine objektorientierte Erweiterung für ABAP veröffentlicht, die ABAP objects kennzeichnet. Im Jahr 2004 führte SAP seine aktuelle Entwicklungsumgebung NetWeaver ein, die sowohl ABAP als auch Java unterstützt.

ABAP stands for "general report preparation processor", which means "generic report preparation process".

ABAP programs are located in the SAP database and are processed with the tools of the ABAP Workbench. They are compiled, debugged, and executed in the context of the base SAP component, which is usually implemented as part of the SAP web application server.

ABAP programs can be categorized into reports and module tools. The term “report” is freely used to denote programs that process data in a list-oriented manner.

SAP customers can create custom reports and user interfaces using the ABAP programming language. ABAP is easy to learn for programmers, less so for non-programmers. Programmers learning ABAP are believed to have in-depth knowledge of relational database design and object-oriented programming concepts.