The ABAP Development Tools in Eclipse integrate tightly with most of SAP’s strategic areas like Classical development, Web Development, Cloud and Mobility to provide a highly productive end to end development environment. Eclipse is modern Developer tool for ABAPers. A Developer can write an ABAP Class, Program, Function Group, Webdynpro Application and you name it. It has almost everything you need to do and it is evolving.
Not just classical artifacts, Eclipse empowers an ABAPer to create and change new ABAP HANA artifacts like CDS(Core Data Services) views, Table Functions, and ABAP Managed Database Procedures. Creating and changing CDS, Tables Functions and AMDP is not possible with SAP GUI workbench tools!
Why Eclipse?
This question was and can be quite compelling question especially for an old-school developer like me. Well, there are more than a hundred answers to it and we are going to discuss some of the most important ones. If you need an overview of it, you need to click the INDEX button present on the TOP of the page and see the CONTENT of the topics covered.
I like classical SE80 workbench. Do I need to learn how to use Eclipse?
YES… You need to! I understand that the change may be difficult to opt but there are many positive sides of Eclipse which you will come to know as we move ahead with this series of tutorial. When I discuss change, I remember a great saying: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future – JFK
Can you discuss some examples, how an ABAPer can benefit with Eclipse?
To show you tip of the iceberg, some examples can be:
- Development on Eclipse is faster
- If Internet disconnects, changes in Eclipse won’t be lost(we all faced it, now no more)
- Eclipse provides flexible user interface with powerful Editor to assist the end to end development process
- Data preview and ABAP SQL Console
- Eclipse-based Dictionary editors for structures and data elements
- Code Quality Tools (ATC) integration
- ABAP Unit test tools incl. code coverage display
- Seamless integration of troubleshooting tools (Debugger, Performance trace, Short dump analyzer etc.)
- New Documentation capabilities with ABAP Doc
- Eclipse SDK for Partner and customer extensions
- Eclipse marketplace and community