What are some ABAP development resources?

What are some ABAP development resources?

I have read white papers that claim ABAP development programs need to be object oriented. I have looked for decent examples, but have not found anything except for snippets. I have the ABAP Controls Technology book and Design Patterns in Object Oriented ABAP. I mostly write large table update programs, for example to update the materials or BOM tables using BAPIs or BDCs.

I have looked through the demos and examples within SAP, but still have not found anything I thought appropriate for the type of mass-updating programs I write. Design Patterns is interesting but of course it is a dialog program with lots of user interaction.

Do you know where I can find decent examples of batch processing programs which use and take advantage of classes, methods, inheritance, implementation, and events; i.e., the concepts that fully use the OO advantages?

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Most programming problems can be addressed using object methods. The ease with which this can be done, depends considerably on the libraries of classes that are available to the developer. This is one area where ABAP Objects is very deficient, especially in R/3 -- there are few useful classes that you can just pick up and use.

If you have never developed using OO techniques, then I'd suggest NOT starting with ABAP. Rather go through a good Java tutorial, for example Head First Java by Kathy Sierra is excellent. Once you've learned about OO programming, then you can start applying it to the SAP environment. The more recent the release, the easier it is. The new dimension products also contain large amounts of object-oriented development.

This was first published in September 2006