Here's a simple 2 lines code that will print-out the infamous "Hello World" in ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming). Yup, you heard it write - ABAP!!!
REPORT ZHB00001.
*Hello world in ABAP/4 *
WRITE: 'Hello world'.
ABAP is one of many application-specific fourth-generation languages (4GLs) first developed in the 1980s.
It was originally the report language for SAP R/2, a platform that enabled large corporations to build mainframe business applications for materials management and financial and management accounting. ABAP used to be an abbreviation of Allgemeiner Berichtsaufbereitungsprozessor, the German for "generic report preparation processor", but was later renamed to Advanced Business Application Programming. ABAP was one of the first languages to include the concept of Logical Databases (LDBs), which provides a high level of abstraction from the basic database level.
ABAP was intended to be used by end users so that they could manipulate the data themselves, but the 4GL turned out to be too complex for ordinary users. High-level programming skills are still required to create ABAP programs.
ABAP remains the language for creating programs for the client-server R/3 system, which SAP first released in 1992. As computer hardware evolved through the 1990s, more and more of SAP's applications and systems were written in ABAP. By 2001, all but the most basic functions were written in ABAP. In 1999, SAP released an object-oriented extension to ABAP called ABAP Objects, along with R/3 release 4.5.
SAP's most recent development platform, NetWeaver, supports both ABAP and Java.
