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ttrapp
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This short blog entry describes my SDN session proposal on SAP Community Day in Berlin this year. Here is a preliminary version of my slides.

From my point of view a lot of ABAP developers have little experience with the ABAP package concept. In this session I will explain how the package concept works und discuss the application in huge development projects as well as anti patterns in software structuring. In my opinion those errors are due to the fact that even lots of consultants have no experience in the development of bigger applications.

Anti Patterns in ABAP Architecture

From my point of view architecture in ABAP often has been done quite recklessly in the past: “Let’s create a development class and start coding”. This works for small projects: Report programming and implementation of SAP BAdIs. Another team of developers creates another development class and after a short time “software reuse” comes more and more important and there are circular dependencies between both development classes. After some time a third development class is created “on top” of those packages (and the creators even think they created a “layer architecture”) – but soon they realize that violations of the package hierarchy are necessary. In short: For bigger development projects you need techniques and tools to structure your application. I’ll classify some design mistakes that occur if you don’t use a package concept.

The ABAP Package Concept

I’ll introduce the SAP package concepts by telling the differences to the Java package concept and the benefits. From my point of view the SAP package concept was the most important concept added to ABAP after object orientation.

Composition Techniques

So far I discussed only modularization – now it comes to composition. With the SAP package concept there are transparent ways to define the public API of a package. Nevertheless there are even more interface techniques like new BAdIs and Publish & Subscribe interfaces realized by BOR events or its modern counterpart.

Best Practices

I will show several possibilities to structure an ABAP application. I think there are a lot of questions and would like to discuss them:

  • How do you structure your applications? Do you know more patterns and anti patterns?
  • What are your experienced in reengineering huge ABAP applications? How did you introduce the ABAP package concept in your project? How do you cope with the fact that a lot of interfaces of SAP standard have been violated by your developers?
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