Anthony Cecchini is the President of Information Technology Partners (ITP), an SAP consulting company headquartered in Pennsylvania. ITP offers comprehensive planning, resource allocation, implementation, upgrade, and training assistance to companies. Anthony has over 17 years of experience in SAP R/3 business process analysis and SAP systems integration. His areas of expertise include SAP NetWeaver integration; ALE development; RFC, BAPI, IDoc, Dialog, and Web Dynpro development; and customized Workflow development. You can reach him at [email protected].
SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP
SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP provides highly valuable innovations with SAP NW 7.02 and 7.03, they cover a wide range from language and tool enhancements to UI technologies and services, but don’t be concerned you can still rely on your existing ABAP skills and easily extend to emerging technologies like In-Memory, Cloud and Mobile.
Lets take a look at each release and I will try and distill what it’s FOCUS is for us, the developers..
SAP NW ABAP AS 7.02 – Focus on ABAP Language, tools, UI developer productivity
– New language features for more efficient business programming (2nd keys for internal tables etc.)
– Higher developer productivity (code-completion, layer-aware debugging, debugger scripting etc.)
– Enable harmonization and extensibility with Floorplan Manager
SAP NW ABAP AS 7.03 – Focus on end user experience and development services
– Enjoyable user experience with SAP NetWeaver Business Client 3.5 and side panel
– Easy configuration & custom development with Floorplan Manager using WebDynpro ABAP
– BRFplus innovations (Business Rules Framework)
Future Direction – Focus on In-Memory, Cloud, Mobile and developer productivity
– Leverage potential of In-Memory (push code to data, HANA, etc.)
– Higher developer productivity and open standards with ABAP in Eclipse
– Strengthen Cloud infrastructure
Lets dig a little deeper in each release and see what innovations SAP has provided us in the ABAP Language and Tools area.
ABAP 7.02 – Custom Development Enhancements
ABAP language improvements
– Secondary keys for internal tables
– Resumable exceptions
– Data types for exact calculations of large numbers
Developer Productivity features
– Comprehensive string processing
– Efficient and resource optimizing memory usage
– Complete code completion, use expressions as operands and more
Testing, Debugging, Runtime Analysis and Memory Inspection of multi-layered web-based applications
– Coverage results integrated with ABAP Unit results, ABAP Unit Browser in SE80, more detailed coverage results
– Debugger Scripting, Layer-aware Debugging, External Debugging
– Memory Analysis of Web Dynpro for ABAP applications
– New ABAP Runtime Analysis SAT (successor of SE30)
Intelligent Code Completion
Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Space to access the information you need right at your fingertips. Intelligent code completion proposes what to type in and inserts the text proposed: for the entry of all methods, attributes, and interfaces of global and local classes, function modules, and so on.
Secondary keys for internal tables
Internal tables just got even better! Use secondary keys to improve the performance of your application.
New ABAP Runtime Analysis (SAT)
State-of-the-art debugging
In the next part of this BLOG series on What’s New in ABAP 7.02 and 7.03, I will take a look at the Custom Development changes in ABAP 7.03 as well as the new Custom Development Enhancements for UI i.e SAP NetWeaver Business Client.
