ABAP_to_the_Future

It’s best not to stare at the sun during an eclipse.
—Jeff Goldblum
1 ABAP in Eclipse
ABAP’s main development environmen t, the ABAP Workbench (Transaction
SE80), has improved with each new release and has often added features found in
another popular integrated development environment: Eclipse. Now, SAP has bitten
the bullet and adopted Eclipse itself for ABAP programming. In fact, you’ll see
that a lot of the topics covered in this book—the ABAP Test Cockpit, the Business
Object Processing Framework (BOPF), Web Dynpro, Floorplan Manager, and
SAPUI5—are supported by specific tools within ABAP in Eclipse. Some of the
more advanced SAP functionalities—such as creating ABAP-related objects for use
in SAP HANA—can only be done by using ABAP in Eclipse.
Eclipse is an open-source development environment that started life in its current
form around about 2001. It really started to rock in about 2004, and since then a
new version has been released near the end of June every year, each named after
a planet or a satellite.
To oversimplify, Eclipse has traditionally been a much-used development platform
for Java programmers. (To check if this was true, I asked a Java programmer
at the pub if she used Eclipse; she told me yes, she did, and it was “tops”—so that
settles that.) In fact, Eclipse even ment ions Java on its loading screen. (It also
mentions Oracle; you can imagine what SAP thinks about that.) Of course, Eclipse
is not limited to Java, and you should check out Wikipedia if you’re interested in
a full list of compatible languages. (My personal favorite is Groovy, mostly
because it must be wonderful to go to a party and—in the unlikely event that anybody
cares—be able to say that you are a Groovy programmer.)
There is a massive support community for Eclipse, from conferences to online
magazines. To understand why, you ne ed to realize that ABAP programmers
have been rather spoiled by having the Transaction SE80 development environment
entirely inside the ABAP reposito ry. In other language s, even relatively
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