What Does Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) Mean?
Advanced business application programming (ABAP) is a 4GL application-specific programming language developed in the 1980s by the German software company SAP. The syntax of ABAP is somewhat similar to COBOL. ABAP was and remains the programming language for the development and modification of SAP applications.
The widely installed R/3 system was first released by SAP in 1992 and developed in ABAP.
In 1999, SAP released an object oriented extension to ABAP, which denoted ABAP objects. In 2004, SAP introduced its current development environment called NetWeaver, which supports both ABAP and Java.
Translated from German, ABAP stands for Allgemeiner Berichtsaufbereitungsprozessor which means “generic report preparation process.”