SAP Technical Brief SAP NetWeaver. Increase IT Productivity with ABAP Development Tools for SAP NetWeaver

Transcription

1 SAP Technical Brief SAP NetWeaver Objectives Increase IT Productivity with ABAP Development Tools for SAP NetWeaver

2 The drive for better, more efficient IT The drive for better, more efficient IT Your developers depend on the ABAP programming language to build the applications that support your company s business processes. Day in and day out, you witness the central role it plays in your company s operations. That s why you place a high priority on empowering your team to be as productive as possible. The fact is, IT can be a timeconsuming and costly endeavor. But an effective environment can help increase efficiency and drive down costs. For example, wouldn t it be nice to have a common environment with support for both ABAP and non-abap projects so that your developers can work more effectively on mixed-language projects? How about analytical modeling functionality to take greater advantage of the SAP HANA platform? Or what about a common UI modeling tool to ensure a harmonized experience? The goal is simple: to streamline the process wherever possible across stages such as project management, implementation, testing, and bug tracking. But you also want the flexibility to add third-party or custom-developed tools to address whatever unique requirements you may have. And perhaps most important, you want a tool that your developers can understand. 2

3 Streamline To help you dramatically increase the speed and quality of, SAP has now brought ABAP to the Eclipse platform one of the most well-known and widely used integrated environments (IDEs) in the world. SAP has long been playing an active role in the Eclipse Foundation as one of its strategic members. An impressive number of designtime,, and administration tools from SAP already make use of the Eclipse platform. These include the SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer tool, the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio tool that can be used for Java, Sybase Unwired Platform, and the SAP HANA studio. Our latest addition to this family is ABAP tools for SAP NetWeaver. This will help your ABAP developers do what they do faster and better across a wide range of activities. ABAP on the Eclipse platform? What a great idea. 3

4 Streamline The architecture for this offering is designed so that developers use a single Eclipse client, installed locally, that connects to several ABAP back-end systems of different releases using an RFC/REST-based protocol (see figure on next page). This allows your developers to control all activities in a central location and helps avoid time-consuming context switches. The client provides a set of standard Eclipse tools such as the project explorer for system browsing and search views. In addition, your developers have access to user-friendly editors for each object classes, interfaces, reports, function modules, and so forth. The paradigm, however, is still server based which means that objects are stored solely on the back end. This helps to minimize complexity by sidestepping the need to create local copies using check-in/ check-out functionality. In addition, services such as syntax-check, search, where-used, and others run on the back end. 4

5 Developer Eclipse client Tools RHTTP via RFC ABAP back end 1 REST services ABAP back end n Eclipse platform REST services Streamline 5

6 Streamline Streamline Designed to speed up and streamline daily tasks, ABAP tools for SAP NetWeaver are all about developer productivity. With Eclipse, your developers can increase their productivity even more. It all starts with a highly flexible Eclipse user interface that can be adjusted to your developers needs. This interface maintains context information on the screen layout and the editors after it is closed. When your developers open up the IDE again, everything is where they left it. Developers working with various release versions of the ABAP back end can connect and access them in parallel in one client. Connection stability is supported by failover mechanisms, which help ensure that the IDE survives lost connections. Ultimately, this combination of flexibility and stability makes it easier for your organization to support simultaneous, high-performance, online. Developers can display and edit multiple ABAP objects in parallel using a standard Eclipse multitab editor. Enhanced version management, meanwhile, supports the cross-system comparison of ABAP sources. Continued on next page Flexibility and stability that s a good combination. 6

7 Streamline From your experience with the classic workbench for ABAP, your developers are already accustomed to advanced and efficient source-code editing. Fortunately, this same level of advanced functionality and efficiency is all there in Eclipse as well. You get syntax highlighting, code completion, autoinsertion, formatting of source code, efficient code templates, and more. ABAP tools for SAP NetWeaver also support refactoring to reduce your workload and optimize the creation of source code. Your developers can locally rename variables and methods, clean up unused variables, and do quick fixes for creating missing method declarations and implementations. SAP also provides quick search for ABAP objects with as you type results and a rich where-used list for ABAP objects to speed source code navigation. Strong navigation functionality enables your developers to find their way around the source code more effectively and access code information with greater efficiency. They can also view and navigate through the structure of ABAP objects in the special outline view or use a similar quick-outline view directly in the editor. Drive down the cost of dramatically. 7

8 Streamline With functionality for test-driven, this offering enables your developers to pursue various flavors of the agile methodology. You ll benefit from special refactoring tools for test-motivated code restructuring, parallel execution of ABAP unit tests, and lightweight visualization of test results as is common with the JUnit testing framework. Time-efficient, task-oriented is facilitated using Eclipse Mylyn the taskfocused interface based on the application lifecycle management framework for Eclipse. Making multitasking easier, Mylyn optimizes workflow and helps your developers do more. Advanced task scheduling, context management, and editing functionality empower your developers to work more efficiently on different kinds of tasks such as new feature, issue tracking, and project management. Mylyn also identifies relevant information and allows your developers to view it all through Eclipse editors. In the end, this dramatically reduces information overload for your developers. Develop more applications faster with support for agile techniques. 8

9 Streamline When you use Eclipse as the platform for ABAP, you open up a whole new world of possibilities. For example, using the Eclipse plug-in framework, your developers can add a wide range of new tools and features to the Eclipse IDE that can help further increase efficiency and effectiveness. To make even better use of the extensibility of Eclipse, we are considering the addition of a software kit that allows you to use these plug-in capabilities on the ABAP back end as well. We ve also preserved the ABAP server-based paradigm with all its familiar features and functionality. Your developers can reuse their existing skill set which will make the transition to Eclipse that much easier. On the other hand, for those developers coming from the Eclipse world, the entry barrier to ABAP will be much lower than with the traditional ABAP environment. Overall, this can save you a tremendous amount of time and training costs. What s more, this offering is already covered by your existing developer licenses for SAP NetWeaver. This makes it not only a wise choice for your team but also an affordable choice for the enterprise overall. 9

10 Future ready and highly productive Future ready and highly productive When you use ABAP tools for SAP NetWeaver on the Eclipse platform, you re ready for the future. With the alwaysgrowing Eclipse ecosystem, new tools are constantly appearing on the market. This offering makes it easier for you to incorporate them for ABAP. And because you can install ABAP tools for SAP NetWeaver along with the SAP HANA studio in the same Eclipse client, you can take advantage of the tremendous opportunities to be had with in-memory. Of course, this offering also helps your developers be more productive. They get a high degree of flexibility and a rich Eclipse user experience along with new capabilities for sophisticated source-code implementation as well as task-oriented and test-driven business. And thanks to the integration of ABAP and non-abap tools into your open and powerful Eclipse IDE, you can do cross-platform application more effectively than ever before. Let s put it this way: ABAP tools for SAP NetWeaver on the Eclipse platform helps your team perform better. 10

11 Objectives Summary With ABAP tools for the SAP NetWeaver technology platform on Eclipse, you can dramatically improve productivity. The Eclipse platform offers market-leading usability, speed, and flexibility. At the same time, you still benefit from the proven features of ABAP tools such as convenient lifecycle management and tight integration with the SAP NetWeaver Application Server component. Objectives Reduce the total cost of and increase efficiency Streamline the process Consolidate ABAP and non-abap on a single environment Leverage a wide range of tools provided by third-party vendors Flexible, customizable environment for ABAP Simultaneous, high-performance, failoversafe online Efficient code editing and refactoring Fast search and navigation Task-oriented and test-driven Built-in extensibility and a software kit for building and integrating custom tools Increase developer productivity Be ready for the future with tools for developing on the SAP HANA platform Enable cross-platform application Continuously improve with a wide range of tools available through the Eclipse ecosystem Learn more To find out more, call your SAP representative today or visit us online at or Copyright/Trademark Privacy Impressum 11 CMP19840 (12/06) 2012 SAP AG. All rights reserved.