ABAP_to_the_Future

1
ABAP in Eclipse
small programs can generate a large numberof files, which are initially developed
and stored on your local machine. Then you have to deploy them somewhere and
make sure, for large projects, that the different versions of the program on different
machines do not overwrite each other. That all sounds rather painful, and no
one likes to be burdened with mundane tasks while developing programs. Therefore,
you need a really good development environment to take care of these tasks
for you; Eclipse is that environment.
If you’ve been paying attention, you might notice that more recent features in the
ABAP Workbench look suspiciously like fe atures that you find in Eclipse (e.g.,
automatic code completion or coloring keywords differently from variables).
Eventually, SAP decided to make the leap; in July 2012, SAP NetWeaver Development
Tools for ABAP (ADT) was released. Everyone calls it “ABAP in Eclipse,”
because (a) that’s what it is and (b) the official name makes you sound like you
have swallowed a dictionary when you say it. (You may be familiar with this phenomenon
from other SAP product names.)
Although Eclipse is a step in the right direction, change isn’t always easy, and SAP
quite rightly suspected that traditional ABAP developers would be horrified by
the very thought of not performing development tasks in Transaction SE80 or its
subset transactions, like SE24, SE37, or SE38. To try and cushion the blow, SAP
gave advance warning that it was about to release ABAP in Eclipse about a year
before the release, and naturally the SAP Community Network (SCN) website
exploded with “I would rather die than use this” comments (a slight exaggeration,
but only slight). These comments were virtually always from people who had
never even heard of Eclipse before, let alone used it to develop an application. As
a response, I had to go and put a cat amongst the pigeons by publishing a very
short blog post called “SE24 is Rubbish” in which I extolled the virtues of Eclipse.
(SE24 is not rubbish; I was just stirring people up.) A torrent of abuse descended
on my head—but now it’s only two year s later, and judging from the blogs on
SCN, the tide has started to turn as more and more people try ABAP in Eclipse and
discover they like it (though to be fair , even now there are still a lot of negative
comments).
The purpose of this chapter is to show you the features of ABAP in Eclipse and
let you decide for yourself if it might speed up your day-to-day work. My position
is—naturally—that it wil, so let us see if I can convince you. Section 1.1 will
explain the process of insta lling Eclipse on your local machine and look at the
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