ABAP

ABAP   stands   for   Advanced   Business   Application   Programming.   ABAP   is   a programming   language   that   was   developed   by   SAP   for   developing   commercial applications in SAP environment.

The development process of ABAP went through the following evolutionary stages:

• In early days (1970s) ABAP stood for “Allgemeiner  Berichts-Aufbereitungs Prozessor” (Generic Report Generation Processor). That time ABAP was implemented as a macro assembler under R/2 and exclusively used for creating reports to build mainframe business applications for materials management and financial and management accounting.
• In mid 1980s, ABAP had become an interpreted language and was powerful enough to be used to create business application programs, in particular to program dialog-controlled transactions.
• In early 1990s, the SAP R/3 system was born and ABAP become ABAP/4, that ABAP 4GL (4th Generation Programming Language). It now formed the technical and software basis of the entire SAP System. Apart from system core which is written in C, all SAP application modules, R/3 Basis System and the development environment were now created in ABAP/4.
• At the end of 1990s, ABAP is extended with object oriented programming constructs and from this point on, the language was known as ABAP Objects.
• In the beginning of 2000s ABAP programs were made Unicode-Compatible in order to support the internationalization of the SAP System.
• With SAP technology platform under the name “SAP NetWeaver”, ABAP become the programming interface of the SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP (AS ABAP).
• It was also intended to be used by SAP customers to enhance SAP applications, customers can develop custom reports and interfaces with ABAP programming.