Jumping on the AiE train

Hello fellow developers,

Although I have had my first encounter with the AiE IDE almost 2 years ago, it has taken me quite a lot of time to “push” myself to start using Eclipse regularly. However I do not consider myself to be the exception here, but rather part of a majority that has been used to developing ABAP code for multiple years using our beloved workbench, and that is finding it rather hard to let go 🙂

This is why I was very excited to hear about an initiative such as the AiE Feature Explorer, which really gives any AiE-newcomer a quick demo of the benefits that you can obtain by using the Eclipse IDE. (Catalin Chiuaru, you should give it a try)

There are multiple features that I find very useful which are presented in the Feature Explorer; generally speaking however I am a firm believer that one can greatly speed up the development by using a source-code based view and by taking advantage of the many keyboard shortcuts made available by Eclipse. ( This is why, even before the Feature Explorer, I had glued a list of the most important keyboard shortcuts to my monitor Useful Keyboard Shortcuts for ABAP in Eclipse )

What I find even more important is the fact that for the first time the development environment has really opened up and if there really is a feature missing from your IDE, nothing stops you from sitting down and implementing it on your own SAP NetWeaver How-To Guide: SDK for the ABAP Development Tools

So to sum it up … there really isn’t any excuse for anyone of us to not start using AiE right away ( except perhaps if one is limited by the AS used in the current project – if I recall correctly AiE is available as of Netweaver 7.31 )

Best regards

Victor