ABAP_to_the_Future

Structure of the Book
technologies developed by SAP (e.g., SAPUI5 and SAP HANA) require the use of
ABAP in Eclipse. There are also speciali zed integration tools in Eclipse for some
topics covered in other sections of the book, such as the Business Object Processing
Framework (BOPF) and Web Dynpro AB AP (WDA). Therefore, if you really
want to be at the cutting edge, then you need to become familiar with Eclipse in
a hurry.
Chapter 2: New Language Features in ABAP 7.4
Fish is no good without chips, and ABAP in Eclipse would likewise not be much
good without ABAP. The good news, for the nervous among us, is that despite all
the horrifying new tools SAP has invented, you will still do the bulk of your programming
in ABAP. The even better news is that SAP continues to enhance the
ABAP language. Chapter 2 covers recent innovations before the 7.4 release that
do not seem to be widely used yet, an d then moves on to the radical changes in
the 7.4 release that will pr etty much allow you to write programs with half the
lines of code you needed before.
Chapter 3: ABAP Unit and Test-Driven Development
ABAP Unit has been around for a while but is not widely used. I feel that this is a
crying shame, which is why this topic is near the start of the book. The idea is that
you write your tests first before coding any actual business logic, and if followed
properly, then you can make your applications cast iron in regard to their ability
to not buckle under the constant stream of changes required.
This applies to every single other topic in this book: Everything you create needs
to be testable. (You will find that some technologies mentioned in the book, like
BOPF and BRFplus, have their own test tools attached as well, but that is just icing
on the unit testing cake. ABAP in Ecli pse also has excellent support for ABAP
Unit, for both helping you create the tests and running them.)
Chapter 4: ABAP Test Cockpit
When you follow the recommended deve lopment lifecycle of an application
(which I didn’t make up, by the way!), first you write the tests, then you write
production code until those tests pass, and then, once everything is working, you
refactor the code (i.e., make it better without changing the function).
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