ABAP in the Cloud Is This a Good Thing Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Bjrn Goerkes executive keynote at SAP Tech. Ed 2. 01. 7, Las Vegas. While there were many interesting take aways from this talk, perhaps the most notable bullet point for developers like myself was the announcement of SAPs plans to eventually provide an ABAP development environment within the SAP Cloud Platform SCP. Though this development was met with thunderous applause throughout the SAP community, I find myself rather skeptical about the benefits of adding ABAP into the cloud development mix. What follows is my attempt to explain my concerns. Disclaimer. Before the ABAPs. Not. Dead lynch mob comes knocking at my door, I want to issue an important disclaimer I think ABAP is a fine language for developing on premise enterprise applications. Ive developed with ABAP extensively for going on 1. I may draw here were not formed haphazardly. Suffice it to say that Im not an ABAP hater just trying to throw shade on old school technology. Whats So Different About the Cloud AnywayEver since SAP released the SAP Cloud Platform back in the NeoHANA Cloud Platform days, Ive had many discussions with developer peers that dismiss the SCP as just another attempt by SAP to push Java on the developer community. Sort of like a Net. Weaver Java 2. 0 if you will. However, while Java has been sort of the de facto flagship language of the SCP to this point, the open approach SAP took with SCP is so radically different from Net. Weaver Java theres hardly any comparison between the two platforms. This is not just about ABAP vs. Java or any other language for that matter. As a Platform as a Service Paa. S, SCP offers so much more than programming environments like Java. The whole point of a Paa. InformationWeek. com News, analysis and research for business technology professionals, plus peertopeer knowledge sharing. Engage with our community. Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1997th year of the Common Era CE and Anno Domini AD designations, the 997th year of. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. This web version of the Report is an. I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul. S offering like SCP is to provide developers with a modern and flexible environment that can be used to rapidly develop new applications, extension apps, and so forth. Included in this environment are a series of backing services which span lower level functions such as persistence and connectivity, platform level services for rolling out mobility and Io. T solutions, and even business level services such as SAP Hybris as a Service Yaa. S which provide reusable application building blocks such as tax as a service. Timothy Good Above Top Secret Pdf To Excel' title='Timothy Good Above Top Secret Pdf To Excel' />As you experiment with the platform, one of the things youll notice is that these services are language agnostic. Indeed, when you browse through the SCP help documentation, youll find lots of examples for consuming these services from Java, Node. Python, and so on. This separation of concerns has become even more pronounced with the release of the relatively new Cloud Foundry environment which has ushered in a true bring your own language BYOL approach to app development on the SCP. As a developer, Ive been very excited about the BYOL language approach afforded by Cloud Foundry, but not just because I want to tinker around more with Python or other language types although thats definitely true. The primary advantage that I see with the BYOL approach is that it gives developers a much more modern tool set to deal with one of the biggest challenges I see in enterprise development space right now gravitic anomalies. If you look at the figure below, you can get a sense for what I mean when I talk about gravitic anomalies. While SAP S4 or SAP ECCSo. H on premise systems remains a crucial part of the digital core for most companies, lots and lots of new cloud based systems are popping up all over the enterprise software landscape. Whether were talking about SAP applications like SAP Success. Factors, Ariba, or Hybris or 3rd party applications such as Workday and Salesforce, the point is that the constellations in the IT landscape are shifting and this presents many challenges for application developers. Hybrid landscapes like the one shown above present much more than just integration challenges. When you add Saa. S solutions into the mix, theres a limit to what kind of functionality we can push out to the application endpoints. For example, if a company decides to implement SAP Success. Factors, there are certain things they can customize, but much of the system is locked down as standard. Customers are not permitted to modifyenhance the delivered Java code, for example. This phenomenon similarly applies to an ABAP based cloud solution like SAP S4 HANA Public Cloud. Here, if you have requirements that extends beyond the basic in app extension points, your only alternative is to build external enhancement solutions on top of RESTful APIs provided by the Saa. S solutions. As more and more of these systems enter the mix, the question becomes where do we go to build app extensions In the old days of pure on premise landscapes, the gravity of a large SAP ERP instance would cause many shops to build app extensions in ABAP because it was just easier that way. After all, the SAP system owned most of the data, there was usually plenty of application resources to go around on the SAP application server cluster, and companies had an army of ABAPers to throw at the problem. Some middleware might be required to navigate through low level technical issues, but for the most part, ABAP would win by default regardless of whether or not it right tool for the job. Nowadays, I think most enterprise architects agree that it makes sense to start moving these kinds of development efforts away from endpoint systems and over to a centralized and standalone Paa. S. Whether this is SAP Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or Amazon Web Services doesnt really matter. Nor does it necessarily matter if the Paa. S is in the public cloud or in a private cloud e. Azure Stack. In the end, the goal is to find an environment where you can efficiently innovate around the edges of your ever evolving IT landscape and insulate yourself from inevitable changes. Personally, I think that prudent companies will also look to open standards and technologies to implement these innovations on top of their preferred Paa. S provider. Besides protecting you from vendor lock in, this approach also opens you up to a much wider ecosystem of developers, libraries, and frameworks. As a software engineer, I look at ABAP as one of many possible tools to use to solve a problem. Convert Pdf To Html Javascript. If its the best tool for the job, thats great. But if not, I dont see why youd want to force it. For example, when building extension apps in the cloud world, its important to be able to process REST API calls, parse JSON XML, and expose APIs to frontend Java. Gundam Sd G Generation Psp English'>Gundam Sd G Generation Psp English. Script based frameworks like SAPUI5 which drives SAP Fiori. Though its technically possible to accomplish these kinds of tasks in ABAP, I would submit from experience that its much easier and elegant to use a more modern programming environment like Node or Python for these kinds of tasks. After all, they grew up doing this kind of stuff, so theyre just natively better at it. The Missing Factors of ABAPIn 2. Heroku the Paa. S subsidiary of Salesforce published a set of best practicesprinciples for developing cloud based apps called The Twelve Factor App. While I wont go into detail on all 1. I think make ABAP a rather poor choice for cloud native app development Dependencies. This factor is all about explicitly declaring and isolating dependencies. As of today, this is not something that ABAP does very well at all.