A fresher's take: ABAP on SAP Cloud Platform

Published: 3/9/2023

The original post was written October 5th, 2017. This post has been recreated. I have monitored my site analytics for a while and this post is the consistently reoccurring one that shows up in my 404 list. I've recreated and redesigned my website multiple times since then and have lost the original content. This is an updated version of the post, remembering what I can of the old post and adding in some new takes as well.

Originally when I wrote this post, over 5 years ago, I had written about my thoughts around SAP Cloud Platform (now BTP - Business Technology Platform) and how I was going to start preparing for cloud development as an up and coming ABAP developer. Since that post has be lost in the internet ether and unable to be recovered, I can only remember so much about what I had wrote back then.

I remember I had a list of about 10 different things that I planned to focus on that I thought would help give me a good foundation to be a productive developer on the cloud. I'm thinking my bets on a few of those were beneficial because there are only three that I can remember to date.

The few things I was thinking I needed to learn back then:

Git
Javascript (for Node.js and UI5)
CDS Views

Since those 3 things are things that I can remember, then they have obviously aged well.

Git continues to be a necessary skill for really any developer in this day and age. The open source project, abapGit, has continued to grow along with the number of open source ABAP projects. It took me a long time to really understand the workflow of Git, needing to learn the different commands and being efficient with basic workflow using the command line. It was until I created a small website, hosted in on Netlify, and did my first push to my GitHub repository where Netlify then automatically deployed those changes, is when the lightbulb finally turned on. Since then it's been extremely fun learning web development, and learning git has become the by-product.

According to the Stackoverflow 2022 Developer Survey Javascript continues to be the most used programming language. Understandably so because of it's use in just about any type of development. While most of my focus using Javascript was understanding Node.js basics and using it to create React websites, it has helped solidify the fundamentals so that I can navigate a UI5 project without much trouble. UI5 is an entirely different mental model than your run of the mill ABAP development, but worth while to understand.

CDS Views have proven useful. My first hands on work with CDS View was in 2019 and it was difficult to understand and I think there was a handful of things contributing to that. Fast forward to 2022, where my second hands on work with CDS View occurred and I'm appalled I didn't understand it sooner. CDS Views don't need to be that complicated to understand, and they can make UI5 applications extremely powerful with little development work.

Looking in to the future, I plan on continuing to solidify my knowledge in the previously mentioned areas, and off the top of my head I think I will plan on focusing on the following areas:

CI/CD pipelines
RAP (RESTful Application Programming)
CAP (Cloud Application Programming)

Since I'm not much of a fresher anymore, I'll plan on giving this a little more thought and maybe put out a new post on the "not-so-freshers take".

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