ABAP
proprietary programming language of the software company SAP, for programming commercial applications in the SAP environment
ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) is a domain-specific high-level programming language created by the German software company SAP SE. It is currently positioned, alongside Java, as the language for programming the SAP NetWeaver Application Server, which is part of the SAP NetWeaver platform for building business applications.
ABAP was originally an acronym for Allgemeiner Berichts-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor ("generic report preparation processor" in German), but was rebranded as Advanced Business Application Programming in 1996.
ABAP was advertised as fourth-generation programming language (4GL). 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.
The ABAP language was originally used by developers to develop the SAP R/3 platform. It was also intended to be used by SAP customers to enhance SAP applications. Customers can develop custom reports and interfaces with ABAP programming. The language was geared towards more technical customers with programming experience.
ABAP remains as 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 4.6.
The public source identifies “ABAP” as proprietary programming language of the software company SAP, for programming commercial applications in the SAP environment. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around ABAP, proprietary and programming.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q380523. The Library of Congress control number is sh98001561. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996, 1992, 2001 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “ABAP” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.