When you have got the hang of ABAP

In yesterday's blog, I mentioned about getting the hang out of ABAP. As it is a fact that SAP professionals are some of the best paid IT professionals in the world, many programmers from different disciplines are jumping into the bandwagon and discovering that coding skill alone is not enough to be a good ABAP programmer but knowing about the ins and outs of ERP is as important as having the programming skill itself.

Okay, so in yesterday's blog, I mentioned that ABAP certification is not enough. To make it clear, what I meant was, according to my friend who has been working with SAP for almost ten years in Graz, Austria, if he was the screening personnel, he would not immediately jump at hiring a person who shows an ABAP certification right in his face. He said he does not get impressed with the piece of paper. But that is from his perspective. An ABAP certification could be an indication of certain level or proficiency or certain degree of knowledge that has been achieved. But then, this knowledge may only be in theory if most highly likely, there will be a hands-on screening (and an intensive one at that) to determine the deserving candidate.

So for anybody who has jumped into ABAP from another discipline but no real life experience, what would be the best way to get started? Well, if you are not that confident with passing an intensive human resource screening, the best way may be to start with consultancy. It does not matter how the small the client is to begin with. The more small clients you handle, the more collection you have under your belt transforms into an impressive portfolio. It is not uncommon for newly trained or newly certified ABAP programming with no real life experience to have difficulty in breaking into the SAP field. ABAP in particular is very different from mainstream programming language as the applications it is designed for are already in the mold of the classic R/3 modules, BW, SEM and many others. An ABAP programmer needs to have intensive knowledge on commercial or enterprise processes. Remember what the acronym ABAP means - Advanced Business Application Programming.

So, if you are really determined to form your niche in ASAP, make good at ABAP programming. Persevere in learning deeply on commercial and business realities. Remember that SAP is one of the biggest solutions for business applications and the biggest supplier of enterprise resource planning applications. Make your code work for long term uses and ensure that they can strictly follow all business rules.

You should bear in the mind that the competition is not just between two or more programmers from different disciplines learning ABAP. Other competitors are coming from business degrees trying to learn IT and programming. So try to weigh and ask the question: is it easier for an IT guy to learn business intensively or is it easier for a business guy to learn intensive programming? Never be complacent.

Getting the hang of ABAP

In my last blog, I did a comparative picture of the salaries for SAP professionals and while the salary rate varied from one SAP specialization to another, it has been shown that in general, SAP professional are earning a lot higher compared to other IT fields of specialization. It is no wonder that many programmers and IT specialists have been planning to jump into the SAP bandwagon.

But today's SAP has become more sophisticated than ever and with that comes a more powerful ABAP too. This means that programmers from other disciplines may think that just because they have mastered the basic programming constructs, learning ABAP would come as a breeze.

Getting the most out of ABAP requires a lot more than just having an knowing coding and even having an ABAP certification. ABAP works with SAP and SAP is dealing with business solutions and the business world is full of complexities greater than any non-business programmer could ever expect.

For those who want to go ABAP, and SAP professionals say advance programmers are the most preferred, understanding the complexities of enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the key. According to ABAP trainers, most people who into training were Visual Basic and Java programmers and one the basic problems they have encountered is in making them understand the complex architecture of SAP based on the three-tier design.

The three-tier client / server design is composed of the database, the applications and presentation logic. All these components are ran on three separate physical computers. Both the database and the applications components function in extracting and pushing data through the presentation logic tier.

When programmers become more and more familiar with SAP ERP, the step is focusing on the ABAP reports generation. In this step, these programmers need to have an in-depth working understanding of the ABAP dictionary which handles all of the processes pertaining to system data. Under the ABAP dictionary which is an interfaced part of the ABAP Development Workbench can be found the definitions of user all data types including the user defined types such as data elements, structures and table types. It is extremely important to know the dictionary by heart as this is the core of ABAP development where almost all the data are filtered through it.

After learning about SAP ERP and taking the ABAP dictionary by hear, the new developers must learn proficiency in performance optimization and upgrades. ERP is all about data and systems integration and it is critical to have a seamless integration of various data sources and disparate systems. As SAP is a world leader in business solutions, its ERP is top of the line with solutions for all types of industries including some in which people have never dreamed of to be possibly addressed by SAP.
Constant practice makes perfect. A certification is not enough because the theory just slips away. Hands-on, like in any other fields of IT, is what makes ABAP developers master the area of ABAP language in particular and ERP implementation in general.

The SAP Web Application Server

Yesterday, I blogged about SAP Netweaver, the technical foundation for all SAP applications, despite the fact that I had been blogging about a ton of SAP applications already most specifically SAP xApps. I guess it wasn’t too late to get to the core.

Now, let me blog about the SAP Web Application Server. As the name suggest, this is a web server, much like Apache, Microsoft IIS and many other but this one is specialized for all of SAP's cutting edge business solutions.

The Web Application Server (WAS or Web AS) is actually one of the components of SAP Netweaver and is undoubtedly one of the most important products as this serves as a foundation on which all other applications run on.

This product allows the web development of SAP solutions. SAP used to solely rely on the ABAP programming language, but today's development often involves the Java programming language. The Web Application Server is linked with and based on the SAP solution infrastructure. Yes, SAP is very robust, many think of SAP's relative independence as very exclusive and they seem to give the impression that they have an IT world of standards of their own.

SAP's Web Application Server makes possible the development of new internet paradigms such as the combination web services with the transactional operations of ERP. Development of these new internet paradigms start with creating an environment to provide a set of tools carefully matched in order to support many other application. This is called the Web Applications Builder. This is an object-oriented, repository-based development environment employing both Javascript and ABAP. The Web Applications Builder can allow users to develop new kind of enterprise web applications which are the BSP applications while being able to support a complete development lifecycle. Two of the main parts of the applications are the Business Server Pages (acronym BSP) and MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) objects.

As mentioned, the Web Application Server is basically a web server like many other in the industry and the main idea behind the WAS is similar to active server pages (ASP) of ASP or Java Server Pages (JSP) of Sun Microsystems. As such, the WAS can of course support documents containing HMTL and other codes in a web page and codes are compile upon the server by end user request. One can have choice between ABAP or JavaScript for use in the documents.

It can be said that the WAS is an assimilation of conventional Web technologies by adding Web Dynpro for the presentation logic for enterprise websites. The Web Dynpro is actually the SAP NetWeaver programming model .

By using the Web AS, one can publish queries, programs and applications based on ABAP. The WAS also offers some flexibility. With versions from 6.20 up, one can have a choice of creating ABAP only, Java Platform, Standard Edition only or mixed environments.

The architecture of SAP Web Application Server has many complex areas. In tomorrow's blog, we will tackle some of those. For the meantime, I wish you a nice business day.