SAP has decided to relaunch its developer platform, which has given a new name and integrated it with S/4HANA, its in-memory application platform. The company made the announcement at its TechEd 2022 conference, held in Las Vegas this week. In it, the Company CTO Juergen Muellerhas announced a replacement for the SAP S74HANA Cloud ABAP Environment (also known as Embedded Steampunk), which allows programmers to develop via SAP’s own programming language, ABAP.
Last year, the company launched the platform, initially only for select customers, on RISE with SAP, SAP’s partner plan, along with S/4HANA Cloud 2018. In August, it expanded the platform’s availability to anyone who I wish I could access it. Now SAP is uniting the platform with S/4HANA Cloud and S/4HANA on premises (on premise). In other words, according to The Register, they have changed the name of the platform to ABAP Cloud.
Mueller has pointed out in this regard that “ABAP cloud is designed for stable, cloud-ready ABAP extensions directly to S/4HANA in the S/4HANA stack. It involves using SAP public APIS to access S4/4HANA data and functions. Also use public SAP extension points to objects, but modifications to SAP objects are no longer allowed. This means that developers get solid tool support in the IDE.«.
In addition, he added that while developers can continue to use the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model, support for Dynpro or Web Dynpro, a programming tool that was released in 2003, is ending.
For Mueller, ABAP Cloud is “exciting, because it allows clients to get a clean core much easier«. But the developers disagree, pointing out that other than integrating the product with S/4HANA and renaming it, there is little new in ABAP Cloud. Of course, by combining the platform with S/4HANA, there will be a greater audience for this technology. SAP has had quite a bit of trouble convincing users of the benefits of moving to S/4HANA, because they believe they might have to pay much higher costs to get roughly the same functionality that they have.
In addition to these changes to its development platform, SAP has also launched a new model, CAP, or Cloud Application Programming. Designed for Java and JavaScript developers, it includes libraries and tools for the development of business services and applications.
