Eclipse-based ABAP Development

ADT is an alternative to the ABAP workbench. ADT provides the following features:

• A Completely new ABAP development experience on top of the Eclipse platform
• An open platform for developing new ABAP-related tools
• A set of open, language-independent, and platform-independent APIs that developers can use to build new custom tools for ABAP development.

Getting started with ADT

Eclipse allows development in many different programming languages. To support this, Eclipse contains different combinations of tools, called perspectives. If you have ADT installed, you can switch to the ABAP perspective. Choose Window -> Open perspective -> other -> ABAP in the menu bar or choose the open perspective button.

When you use ADT, you log on to an SAP back-end system and work directly with its repository objects. In this sense, the development process is the same as when you use the ABAP workbench.

Editing Repository Objects in ADT

The project explorer provides a hierarchical view of the repository, like the navigation area of the ABAP workbench. Under each project, you can maintain a list of favorite packages. By expanding the node System library, you see a list of packages.

To open a specific repository object in its respective editor, double click it. The editor is shown in the right side of the ABAP perspective. For each new object, a new tab is added.

Different types of editor

There is two kind of editor in ADT- native eclipse implementation and SAP GUI based implementation.