Feature Explorer, yes please

My Background

My first experience in….programming! (I don’t know in what I was thinking…) was with mother’s video tape and TV, I needed to do it lots of times (every damn energy shut down ) that’s how I became an expert, unfortunately the market was full of professionals with my skills, so I moved to assembler (Z80) after I finished my studies, I started looking for a job, “do you have experience?” “Eh….no I just finished my studies”  “NEXT!” after a “few” interviews I ended up in a company which gave me a…c…poor training, but at least I could start working, the platform was SAP and the language, of course, ABAP, 7 years has passed since then, snif snif.  😥

I started with a R3 4.7 and the old editor, felt like going back to the stone age, until I realized newer versions of SAP GUI existed, but still I missed a more powerfull framework as Visual Studio or Eclipse (which I dealt with in college), in a couple of months you get used to SAP GUI, SE80 and you forget the feeling of working with a cool IDE because at least SAP GUI does what is meant for and you get use to it, some cool improvements has been done, I don’t want to be unfair. at least stops to be annoying, there are bigger sources of pain in a SAP project than the ABAP editor….

My Opinion about Eclipse Feature Explorer.

ADT in general Rocks, I’m focused on the CRM side so I miss WebUI compatibility (I don’t know how many times I said this in other blogs/discussions) When I noticed new the feature explorer I was highly surprise, “I see a lot of potential here son”, SAP is usally quite cryptic and the new features/usability are not centralized, the help portal, sap press, Notes/KBs, SCN, etc. Learning is fun, but requires time, usually we are working learning about the project, about the technology, module, etc. Deal with all this sources of information is quite a pain and a waste of time (if we look at the short/medium term), “come on maaaaan!, make my life easier”.

I believe having all the features centralized and in a game format improves a lot the learning experience. I expect more features, of course, and as points Martin Steinberg ABAP lenguage related content (New statements, performance tricks, etc.) would be awesome. In resume, I would encourage anyone to try ADT, specially if you have a stack level high enough to use the debugger, after one week working with it, you probably won’t be able to live without it!

I would like share ADT/Feature explorer with  Aleix Garcia Marshal Oliveras Carsten Kasper Martin Ceronio Nicolas Busson Hasan Rafiq

Get more out of ABAP in Eclipse with the Feature Explorer

Cheers!

Luis