ABAP is one of the many application-specific fourth-generation languages (4GLs) first developed in the 1980s. It was originally the report language for SAP R/2, a platform that enabled large corporations to build mainframe business applications for materials management and financial and management accounting.
ABAP used to be an abbreviation of Allgemeiner Berichtsaufbereitungsprozessor, the German meaning of "generic report preparation processor" , but was later renamed to Advanced Business Application Programming. 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(s).
The ABAP programming language was originally used by developers to develop the SAP R/3 platform. It was also intended to be used by SAP customers to enhance SAP applications – customers can develop custom reports and interfaces with ABAP programming.
ABAP has been consistently optimized for business programming. With the introduction of the R/3 System in the nineties, the ABAP language - now in its fourth generation - became the basis of the entire system, in which all applications and large parts of Basis (as it was referred to at the time) were implemented. In the late nineties ABAP was extended to become a fully featured object-oriented language, and the extension was named ABAP Objects.
ABAP remains the language for creating programs for the client-server R/3 system, which SAP first released in 1992. As computer hardware evolved through the 1990s, more and more of SAP's applications and systems were written in ABAP. By 2001, all but the most basic functions were written in ABAP. In 1999, SAP released an object-oriented extension to ABAP called ABAP Objects, along with R/3 release 4.6.
SAP's current development platform NetWeaver supports both ABAP and Java.
ABAP TRIAL VERSION
You do not have access to an ABAP System? Then download your own, with the SAP NetWeaver 7.02 ABAP Trial Version.
These parts of the ABAP Intro Weblogs guide you through download and installation process of the ABAP Trial Version and advise you how to start the ABAP Application Server to get it ready for your first ABAP development trials.
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