ABAP_to_the_Future

16
Conclusion
They want everything to look as good as the apps on their plethora of mobile
devices and updates to come out every nanosecond.
The SAP tools from circa the year 2000 simply can’t deliver either of those
requirements, so hopefully the contents of this book have shown how you can
use various new or “not so new, but still new to lots of people” tools to do three
things, in increasing order of importance:
왘 Make the user interface look better
왘 Dramatically speed up the development cycle
왘 Make programs less fragile so that they do not break when exposed to that dramatically
increased development cycle
The worst-case scenario is that you st ick with DYNPRO screens and what-haveyou
because “we’ve always done it this way, and it works,” and you are made
redundant after fifteen years at age 50, and then you try and get another SAP programming
job. Chances are that at th e interview your potential new employer
will start asking you questions full of alphabet soup (like AMDP and BOPF and
BRF) and will talk about “the decorator pattern” and as far as you are concerned
they might as well be asking you questions in Klingon.
As much as it fills people with horror, if you accept that these new technologies
are vital for your future, then you must step out of your comfort zone. Some SAP
HANA artifacts, for example, can only be created using ABAP in Eclipse, a development
environment that was strongly opposed when it came out on the basis of
“What’s wrong with SE80?” In the same way, working with user interface technology
such as SAPUI5 really requires an understanding of JavaScript.
Hopefully, in this book you will have seen that all of this new technology is
nowhere near as scary as it might seem at first glance. What I would like you to do
is not simply put this book down and say “That was interesting.” Instead, actually
think of ways to use the contents—tomorrow, in your day-to-day job. That might
hurt, and at the start it might even slow you down, but even in the medium term
(let alone the long term), you will be really glad that you did.
We are authors. And one thing about author s is that they have readers. Indeed,
authors are responsible for communicating well with their readers. The next time
you write a line of code, remember that you are an author, writing for readers who
will judge your effort.
—Robert Martin, Clean Code
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