What goes into a new edition? As a reader, you might be surprised to learn that new editions often take as much time to plan and prepare as new books. Take this fourth edition of ABAP to the Future . To create this book, Paul Hardy read every line of his third edition manuscript. He reviewed updates that had been made to ABAP and related tools, technologies, and topics since the third edition published. He considered how to best structure this edition to help youthe readerlearn. He rearranged chapters within the book and reorganized sections within chapters. Topics were expanded and new chapters added. Each code listing was reviewed or rewritten to provide fresh examples.
The end result is a fascinating and fully-updated guide to both the new and the important to know in the world of ABAP. We hope that this book will help you learn whats on the cutting edge of ABAP and become a better ABAP programmer.
What did you think about ABAP to the Future ? Your comments and suggestions are the most useful tools to help us make our books the best they can be. Please feel free to contact me and share any praise or criticism you may have.
Notes on Usage
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Acknowledgments
Writing this book has been like sticking your hand into a plug socket. There are just so many advances happening in each area of SAP every single month that its always important to get a second opinion.
I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable help on various chapters:
Lars Hvam Peterson for reviewing the chapter on abapGit (his invention).
Jim McDonough for trying to apply the techniques I described in regard to SEGW in previous editions in real life and giving me feedback on to how to improve things in this area.
Graham Robinson and Wouter Lemaire for help on on SAPUI5. Graham originally created the code for the example SAPUI5 application used in the chapter.
Gregor Wolf for helping me work out how to get the cloud connector working so I could try out the SAP Business Application Studio integrated development environment that was needed for .
Naturally, any remaining mistakes are mine.
In addition, many thanks to Ian Cowan, the SAP Basis expert at our company, for setting up a 7.52 SAP system for me to play with. In a similar vein, I would like to thank SAP in general, for arranging access for me and the other mentors to an ABAP in the cloud system in order to see what the ABAP RESTful application programming model was all about.
A large chunk of this book was written in the Horse and Jockey pub in Homebush, Sydney, so thanks to all the staff there. They even gave me my own table with a power point to plug in my PC.
Last but not least, Id like to thank my wife Vikki for putting up with my spending vast chunks of my spare time over the last eight months working on the fourth edition of this book.
Introduction
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: It would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
C. S. Lewis
Doubtless, eggs are lovely places to be inside, full of food and warm from mum sitting on top. However, living inside an egg most likely doesnt give you a good idea of the changes taking place in the outside world. In the world of SAP, such changes can be horrifyingly scary: theres an army of programmers at SAP constantly disgorging a stream of new goodies. Developers around the world would probably love those new features, but often 99% of those programmers who would benefit remain hidden inside their eggs, blissfully ignorant of the new treasure chests in their SAP system basements.
In response to this all-too-common situation, the purpose of this book is to shine a spotlight on such improvements. As such, its aimed at any and all inquisitive ABAP developers. Although the book covers new technology, it also covers some topics that might not be considered new; this is because Ive noticed that many people who are unaware of SAP-delivered improvements that came out six months ago are equally unaware of improvements that came out five years ago. Well give these topics some attention because its possible that youre discovering them for the first time.
The idea for this book comes from an observed reluctance to use new technology, combined at the same time with a compulsion to use new technology. One of the best blog posts ever on the old SAP Community Network website (now just SAP Community) was by Graham Robinson and was titled A Call to Arms for ABAP Developers. In this post, Robinson provides a (supposedly fictitious) example of an ABAP developer who joins a consulting company at the start of the SAP wave in the late 90s. He learned all there was to know about SAP development as it was at that pointall at the clients expenseand then, once the boom died down, got a permanent job at one of the former clients. For a while, all was good, but after 10 years the developer realized that he knew nothing about any of the new technology SAP had come out with because it was always possible to get by using the same techniques that worked in the year 2000.