AIE – The way forward.

Introduction

I am a 10 years experienced SAP professional with 4 years of experience in ABAP and 6 years of experience as a functional consultant in SAP FICO. At the start of my career I was trained in JAVA and we used apache tomcat server and eclipse for all our developments back then. After I completed the training I was asked to learn SAP-ABAP. In the beginning I was a bit reluctant towards it, as I think, everyone is opposed to change. The thought process was; all the learning and hard work I had put in learning JAVA is going to go down the drain. But after spending 1 week in the training I felt right at home and I was totally comfortable with the ABAP editor. Since then I loved ABAP.

Working in Eclipse

As I knew Eclipse from my experiences as JAVA developer some years ago, I was really excited to see how ABAP in Eclipse will look. I knew the former problems with the right versions of the JAVA Plug-Ins and their dependencies, This was always a great trouble in the JAVA Projects. So this offer from SAP with a pre-installed development Environment in the cloud works perfect for me! You need nothing to do, just click and execute and everything works. You did a perfect Job, guys!

I might have to spend some time in getting a local installation of AIE in my laptop rather than using AWS cloud image. But i think with all the help availble on SCN it shouldn’t be a problem.

Eclipse feature explorer:

Right at home – Once you are in the SAP HANA development perspective in eclipse, and open any ABAP object, you will feel that nothing has changed. You can still do a command based navigation, as well as menu based navigation.
One stop place – Eclipse is known as one of the best integrated development environments available to date. Now i can code anything and everything in one place, test it, and deploy, be it, my java developments or ABAP. How cool is that!!
Open SQL – Just got off from one of the openSAP courses about enhancements in open SQL and i am quite excited to experiment them on my own. Here is the link to the course.
Debugger – I used the new debugger in eclipse and really liked the new capabilities in there like code editing while debugging. Now i can debug find out the issue and then align the code right then and there. Of course for the new code changes to take effect i have to activate it. I could not find some features like “Go to statement” and “memory analysis covering SAP and ABAP memory” in the new ABAP debugger in eclipse. May be i need to explore a bit more on it.
Web Dynpro Developments – I need to say that this area needs some work. The user interface for all WD-ABAP developments in se80 is much much better than what we have in eclipse. Like if you need to create a node in the context, you have to explicitly click on the node and then rename it, as compared to se80 where the system intuitively asks for a node name. Same applies to the attributes. But i guess, the road forward is Fiori, so now would have to focus on that.
Local editing – The inherent feature of eclipse is code check-in and check-out for all developments. My first thought when i came to know about ABAP in eclipse was yooohoooooo, now we can code locally while having lunch or while travelling back home, i and then sync back the code. But i must agree that i was a bit disappointed here.

Spread the word:

It is a must try for all ABAP developers. If you not tried it yet, please get a trial version on cloud or get a local installation to get your hand dirty. Here are some helpful links.

Getting development System: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-56314

Development Centre: http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center

Getting Started: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-31815

Good Blog: http://scn.sap.com/community/abap/eclipse/blog/2012/08/25/lets-see-what-this-aie-stuff-is-capable-of

With the new code-to-data paradigm approach together with the enhancements done in open SQL, the programming would just get more exciting.

I nominate Liew HanYean to share his experience in AIE.