#95 SAP Build, ABAP RAP, Tasks vs Purpose

In this issue:

• What on Earth is SAP Build?

• ABAP with AI: Look Outside SAP

• For ABAP RAP Artists

• Tasks Versus Purpose

Back in 2023, SAP went on one of its renaming benders and shoved a bunch of random products under the “SAP Build” umbrella. The result: even the official websites aren’t clear on what SAP Build actually is.

The Discovery Center confidently claims: “SAP Build is a comprehensive solution for business application development and automation.” The product page vaguely hints that “SAP Build helps teams create and extend AI agents and business applications in their preferred tools.” And SAP Help takes “it’s a mysterious and powerful device” route: “The SAP Build ecosystem comprises a number of services designed to empower you in fostering innovation.”

There is a large chain of home-improvement stores in the US called Home Depot. You can walk into one of those three-acre stores and buy a lightbulb, a bathtub, and a 2×4 piece of lumber in a single trip. I’m sure other countries have similar stores but probably with less square footage. SAP Build feels kind of like that. Nuts and bolts, then suddenly, a lumberyard.

Here are the most notable aisles in the SAP Build Depot:

• SAP Build Process Automation. The artist formerly known as SAP Process Automation, and even more formerly as SAP Intelligent RPA. It used to be a hot item a few years ago, never really caught up with competitors (IMHO), and is probably on track to be replaced by AI agents.

• SAP Build Apps. This is the good old AppGyver (see also our previous story). We barely hear about no-code solutions anymore, and I can’t help wondering whether it will go the way of RPA too.

• SAP Build Work Zone. This is a funny one and no, it’s not another name for SAP GUI. The “advanced edition” is what was formerly called SAP Work Zone, while the “standard edition” is the former SAP Launchpad service. There’s an FAQ page if you’re interested in digging into what’s what. Or just wait 15 minutes for the next round of renaming.

• SAP Business Application Studio (BAS). An SAP IDE mostly used for CAP and Fiori development, as far as I know. You can probably do other things with it too, but I’m not sure why anyone would want to.

• Runtime services. There’s a rather long list here, including ABAP, Kyma, and Cloud Foundry. I imagine some SAP executive was like, “Do these have something to do with development? Put it all under Build then!”

If you’re interested in adding SAP Build to your resume, there is a decently laid-out learning journey that covers the products mentioned above. Good luck! JP

The best ways to develop with ABAP, and accelerate it with AI, come from outside of SAP. You can have an amazing development experience by trying out any one of several community-created tools, and they’re quite a bit better than the Joule that is tuned for ABAP. I have three shout-outs and a concluding thought (which is not actually haterade but I thought the image was too fun to pass up).

For those who want a different (and better) IDE experience with ABAP: close all your Eclipse or SE80 windows and try out Marcello Urbani’s ABAP extension for vscode. (And then go give feedback on the latest release.) The ergonomics of vscode make it feel…just…so much better than Eclipse/SE80. There’s probably a learning curve to deal with if you’ve not encountered vscode in your developer life, but I strongly encourage you to take the time to ascend it. Combine the ergonomics of the vscode experience with AI agents available all over the place, and you’ll feel the AGI.

Marian Zeis has done awesome things on two fronts: MCP and ABAP benchmarking for LLMs. SAP has had activity in the MCP scene with official releases, but I think the real creativity and power has been happening in the community, including Marian’s latest. I won’t linger too much on the benchmarking thing, except to say that it is clear as day that more general smartness absolutely crushes really specific fine-tunes of older models. ABAP-1 (which is at least part of the smarts behind the Joule for Developers, ABAP AI stuff) made the wrong tradeoff here, and the benchmarks show it. Plus, if you try the Joule/ABAP experience and then you try a different flavor of SAP-connected AI with ABAP, you’ll feel the AGI.

To my mind, Alice Vinogradova leads the way in maximizing both raw AI power availability and kickass creativity. First, her open source MCP server comes packed with the most vitamins and minerals of its class. Hook this bad boy up to Claude Code and strap in for a face-melting display of ABAP power. Then, drop into Vivid Vibes and relive the demoscene. I am not kidding when I say that at least once a week I drop by the video to get the ol’ ticker moving. The mix of creativity and tech mastery has me - yet again - feeling the AGI.

(Actual AGI definitions, vibes, and mileage may vary. See your dealer for specifics.)

All of this stuff is powered by community forces outside of SAP. You might think I’m trying to crap on SAP, but the realization I continue to have is that AI which is geared for ABAP development just hasn’t cracked the top of anyone’s priority list in Walldorf. And when you think about what ought to be the business priorities, I can see that reasoning. PM

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Assorted news for ABAP RAP artists (pun shamelessly stolen from Michael Nicholls because I like it).

• Michael posted on LI about authorization control in CRUD applications. It can be a bit confusing that Read access is controlled differently than the rest of CRUD. And sadly, good information on this subject isn’t that easy to find on Google these days: I got pages of junk as top results when searching. Bookmark this SAP Help page for reference.

• If you watch any ABAP RAP tutorial, you’ll see that metadata part is rather important but also the most boring and tedious part of the process. But there is a light at the end of metadata tunnel! See this excellent post about Eclipse ADT Metadata Wizard.

• This SAP Community blog post with a bear of a title “Tweaks for RAP BO events addressing filtering (before send) and too small payload (callbacks needed)” is very detailed and well-written. By the way, if you’re interested in RAP BO events, there was also a session about it in the last ABAPConf. JP

A firefighter has a purpose: save lives from fires. If you do the training, wear the suit, climb into a firetruck, drive to a fire, and then sit motionless on the curb: you will have done 90% of the tasks firefighters do, but you could not reasonably be called a firefighter. The purpose was not met.

If you don’t do the training, don’t wear the suit, don’t travel by firetruck, but you go to a fire and use a magic spell to summon a rainstorm to put out the fire: you will have done almost none of the tasks firefighters do, but you will be a firefighter. You met the purpose.

Go watch/listen to this episode of No Priors. Guest Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, gives a great explanation of the task/purpose distinction in human labor, which I’ve poorly re-stated above. But since I heard Huang’s take, I can’t stop thinking how powerful that explanation is.

AI is eating the tasks of software engineering. If you’ve tried the latest Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, it’s as plain as day that writing code by hand will be largely dead. Soon. My SAP development friends, the time is NOW to think about your task/purpose balance sheet. If you have to skill up one thing for the future, skill up your purpose-finding. PM

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