Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP)

ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) is a very high level programming language created by SAP. SAP’s most recent development platform, NetWeaver, supports both ABAP and Java for programming SAP’s Web Application Server.

ABAP is one of the many application-specific fourth-generation languages (4GLs). ABAP was one of the first languages to include the concept of Logical Databases (LDBs), which provides a high level of abstraction from the basic database level. It was also intended to be used by SAP customers to enhance SAP applications, customers can develop custom reports and interfaces with ABAP programming.

All ABAP programs reside inside the SAP database. In the database all ABAP code exists in two forms: source code, which can be viewed and edited with the ABAP Workbench tools, and generated code. ABAP programs execute under the control of the runtime system, which is part of the SAP kernel.

SAP has three different layers as presentation layer (GUI), application layer (programs run on this) and data base layer where all data is stored and retrieved from user driven conditions, commands given by end user programmer through presentation layer.

In ABAP, there are 7 different types of programs:

Include, executable, function module, module pool, subroutine, class, interface