Getting started with ABAP in Eclipse IDE

[Paulo_Vantini]

When I went to college I had already learned the basics of programming languages through C and VB. During my graduation in Industrial Engineering I had my first contact with other languages such as PHP and JAVA. After I finished my graduation I had my first contact with SAP in 2007 when I started working as SAP MM key user at an oversea company. But my passion for programming languages led me to start an SAP Netweaver 7.0 academy to learn ABAP in 2011. By the time I finished the academy I took the exam for certification and started working as an ABAP fresher. Then I got excited with technologies such as WDA, BSP and so on.

Talking about Eclipse IDE I used before just for PHP and JAVA programming languages. I never thought It would be possible to use it for ABAP programming language before I took the Eclipse Explorer challenge. The feature explorer is helpful not just for onboard developers but for experienced ABAPers who never used Eclipse before. Because it shows the hot keys, how to seek class relationships, find where used objects, etc.

My favorite feature of the beginners tour is the possibility to use all the cool stuff from the ABAP workbench such as the code completion to insert a method or a function call including its signature. It is very useful since we developers have functions and methods with lots of parameters.

I explored additional features that are very useful like the ADT links so that other colleagues can check the source you want to. It is easily explained by Thomas Alexander in his blog: http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/eclipse/blog/2013/05/10/how-adt-links-change-the-way-you-work

It would also be great if it were possible to have a source-based editor for dictionary types like structure and data elements. Nevertheless, I am thrilled with my ABAP experience in Eclipse IDE. I would like to thank Thomas Fielder and the team for such brilliant work. I hope it keeps improving and evolving!