ABAP
By SAP
ABAP, short for Advanced Business Application Programming, is SAP's proprietary programming language used to develop custom applications, reports, and extensions within SAP enterprise resource planning systems. It provides both procedural…
Definition
ABAP, short for Advanced Business Application Programming, is SAP's proprietary programming language used to develop custom applications, reports, and extensions within SAP enterprise resource planning systems. It provides both procedural and object-oriented constructs tightly integrated with SAP's database access layer, screen and form technologies, and business object framework, and it runs exclusively within the SAP application server environment rather than as a general-purpose standalone language.
Overview
ABAP originated inside SAP as an internal report-generation language for its early R/2 mainframe systems before evolving into a full application development language for the R/3 client-server platform and its successors. Its purpose has always been narrower than general-purpose languages: rather than serving arbitrary software development, ABAP exists specifically to let developers customize, extend, and build on top of SAP's suite of business applications, which cover areas like finance, logistics, and human resources. Mechanically, ABAP code runs inside the SAP NetWeaver Application Server, which handles database connectivity, transaction management, and user interface rendering so that ABAP programs interact with these services through defined interfaces rather than raw system calls. The language includes Open SQL, a database-independent syntax for querying SAP's underlying tables that the application server translates into the specific SQL dialect of the configured database. Later versions added full object orientation through ABAP Objects, letting developers define classes, interfaces, and exception handling alongside the language's original procedural reports and function modules. Compared to general-purpose enterprise languages like Java or C#, which developers use to build arbitrary applications, ABAP is scoped entirely to the SAP ecosystem and cannot run outside an SAP application server. It shares some conceptual territory with other vendor-specific business languages such as RPG for IBM midrange systems, in that both exist to let customers customize a vendor's core business software rather than to build independent products from scratch. In practice, ABAP is used by SAP customers and consulting partners to build custom reports, modify standard SAP transactions, develop entirely new SAP-native applications, and integrate SAP systems with external services through remote function calls and web services. Large enterprises running SAP as their core ERP platform typically maintain sizable in-house or outsourced ABAP development teams dedicated to this customization work, since off-the-shelf SAP modules rarely cover every business requirement without adjustment. The language's central trade-off is its total dependency on the SAP platform: ABAP skills and code have essentially no value outside SAP environments, unlike knowledge of general-purpose languages that transfers broadly. Heavy customization written in ABAP can also complicate SAP upgrades, since custom code must be retested and sometimes rewritten against new SAP releases, which is why SAP has increasingly pushed customers toward newer, more restricted extension models intended to keep custom logic more upgrade-safe. Organizations weighing new ABAP development therefore consider not only immediate business need but also the long-term maintenance burden of custom code layered on top of a vendor platform that continues to evolve on its own release schedule.
Key Features
- Runs exclusively inside the SAP NetWeaver Application Server
- Open SQL syntax for database-independent access to SAP tables
- Object-oriented extensions through ABAP Objects with classes and interfaces
- Tight integration with SAP's screen, form, and reporting technologies
- Remote function calls for integrating with external systems
- Built-in support for SAP's business object and workflow frameworks
- Procedural function modules alongside modern object-oriented style
- Extensive standard library covering SAP business processes