Open Source
Open source has had a particularly difficult time gaining a foothold in ABAP development. Some organizations still question whether publicly available software can be used responsibly in business-critical SAP systems that process company data. Many of these legitimate concerns can be addressed, reducing the risks while enabling the opportunities offered by open-source software. In other programming ecosystems, the opportunities have long outweighed the remaining risks, and processes and tools have been established to integrate open-source components effectively into development workflows. This chapter provides an overview of the current state of open source in ABAP development and introduces processes and tools to…
- …to integrate open source projects into your own solutions (Use of open source software)
- …to participate in open source projects (Participation in Open Source Software)
- …provide your own solutions as an open source project (Open source software development).
Every company has to develop an open source strategy for itself. Here you will find a working basis and experience reports.
What is Open Source?
Open source software (OSS) is software that is provided under a open source license. In all three use cases mentioned above, the license is decisive for the use, modification and further distribution of the provided coding. In addition, this must be freely available, i.e. not only made available to a certain group of people. This allows you, for example, to check the source code of an application before use and generate the binaries for execution yourself, instead of trusting that the files provided correspond exactly to the checked version of the source code. If in doubt, you can fix bugs yourself instead of having to wait for the software provider or rely on support. You can develop additional functionality and integrations yourself and also make them available to other users of the software. You can check promised features such as end-to-end encryption and disabled telemetry yourself.
You can find a comprehensive definition of open source at the open source initiative on the following website: The Open Source Definition.
SAP S/4HANA is not “open source” merely because developers can read source code written by SAP. Open source involves much more than making code visible to customers: it permits use, modification, and redistribution without requiring a customer relationship with the software provider.
Motivation and opportunities
Why should you consider open source in ABAP development? The number of scenarios in which you encounter open source, and also open source ABAP, in everyday life is slowly but steadily increasing. The number of ABAP projects available in the open source community is growing - over 300 projects are listed on dotabap.org. SAP itself publishes software as open source projects, such as Code Pal for ABAP or RAP Generator and various tutorials or learning content, such as RAP100 or Fiori Elements Feature Showcase for RAP. Categorically closing yourself off to this increasingly leads to missed opportunities…
…in optimizing your own development processes
- With tools like ABAP Cleaner, Code Pal for ABAP and abapOpenChecks you can relieve developers of the burden of implementing development guidelines and best practices by partially implementing them automatically and statically checking them in other parts and actively pointing out findings to developers. And this far exceeds the scope of the options provided in the SAP standard.
- With abapGit you have the opportunity to harmonize your development processes across technologies with uniform tooling and to manage your entire company codebase in a single source of truth, instead of viewing ABAP as a special snowflake with special rules. You can conduct code reviews with dedicated tooling. You can automatically undo changes that have been made if the department no longer wants them after development time, without major manual dismantling effort. And all of this even on systems from ABAP release 7.02.
- With abaplint, you can check and develop ABAP code outside an SAP system and even execute it using the transpiler. This enables continuous-integration pipelines without the cost of operating dedicated SAP systems and supports static code analysis and unit testing, with some limitations compared with execution in an ABAP system.
- You can generate boilerplate coding using generators like the RAP Generator or ABAP OpenAPI Generator and then just have to adapt it. In this way, development costs can be saved and, in particular, prototypes can be set up quickly.
…in the implementation of business requirements
- With abap2xlsx you can implement the creative requirements of the departments for creating, reading and modifying Excel files. And that already from ABAP release 7.31. You don’t have to adapt your processes because the OLE-based SAP-API for Excel folders does not support background jobs and expects the user to have Microsoft Office installed. In particular, you do not have to invest the development effort to implement and maintain a codebase that deals with conversion and handling of Excel files. And you don’t have to reject the requirement as not proportionally feasible given the implementation effort; you can build on the work that others have already done.
- The situation is similar with other technical problems for which there are already established open source solutions. For example, ABAP Logger instead of separate wrapper classes around the function modules of the Business Application Log. Or ajson as a JSON library for ABAP release 7.02.
…in external representation
- You can evaluate whether reusable components of your ABAP-based solutions would also make sense as an open source project. Coding that does not implement your business model in competition, but rather serves to optimize the development process or overarching topics such as user experience, revision security or operations, could also be used by other companies. If you publish these components as available software, you enable external participation in the development from which you can benefit.
Additionally, this can serve as a selling point when recruiting new developers. They can see right away that you use modern development practices and aren’t afraid to share your source code with the outside world.
Examples: IBM, Microsoft, rku.it, Schwarz IT - If your company provides services that are implemented through interfaces with partners/customers who also implement them in your SAP systems using ABAP, you can provide an open source SDK that implements your API. Users of the SDK have the opportunity to open issues or suggest additional features themselves via pull requests and reduce your implementation effort or offer more functionality in your software. You can deploy the SDK internally yourself or use it for integration testing.
Examples: ABAP SDK for Azure, ABAP SDK for Google Cloud, AWS SDK for SAP ABAP, Microsoft AI SDK for ABAP, ABAP SDK for IBM watsonx
…in upskilling developers
- By engaging with external libraries and their implementation, you can expand your knowledge of object-oriented design and software architecture. You can become familiar with new technologies or approaches, working directly with production-ready source code rather than demo examples. This effect is particularly amplified when you contribute your own features, bug fixes, and code reviews.
As you can see, there are many places where open source can provide significant added value, including in ABAP development. It is therefore always worth considering the topic, even if only some of the points mentioned above are specifically relevant to you.
Maturity Levels
One possible approach to this topic is to view the various use cases as successive stages that build upon one another:
- You can first deal with the topic of how you can integrate open source tools into your development process and thus immediately achieve added value. Initially, it’s not about open source software components that are in your coding, but simply about tools that are part of your development process and therefore only in your development system landscape. This is often the easiest case to look at and a good entry point into the topic.
This expansion stage is described in Use of open source software.- This level can optionally be expanded with the use of open source projects in your developed software solutions. In this case, the open source components also reach your productive system or are delivered as part of your software.
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Next, you can consider participation in open source projects. You expand or modify an open source project and make these adjustments available to the community so that other companies can also benefit from them. In order for developers to be able to participate in this way, your company must have a guideline on how this can be specifically designed.
This stage is covered in Participation in Open Source Software. - The final stage is developing your own software as open source software. In this case, you offer selected components of your own software solutions as open source software, thereby enabling others to use them and also participate in them.
This stage is discussed in Open source software development.
The individual stages offer different opportunities but also come with different risks and costs. These are addressed in the aforementioned subchapters.