Is ABAP suitable for SAP cloud platform? - abap

There was an announcement that an ABAP development environment and run-time environment will be available on SAP Cloud platform.
Is ABAP well suited for SAP Cloud platform? It is the best option for SAP on Premise solutions.
Regards,
Umar Abdullah

There is no trial account yet. They shown demo on last teched. It has odata/rest service and data manipulation functionality yet. It will have more function before public or not.
There is no technical differences for any cloud provider with SCP yet. You can use other language (java, python, etc) for extending SAP on-promise. ABAP not mandatory for SCP now and it hasn't got any advantage for now. I think ABAP will never mandatory language for extending SAP S/4Hana.

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SAP hana predictive analytics tool

I have HANA installed in a server (RHEL 6.5) with HANA Studio. Now I want to do some predictive analysis in the data which is stored in the HANA database.
I know that there is a tool "HANA Predictive Analytics" for doing that.
But I do not know where to find if the tool is installed or we have to do it manually?
Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance
SAP HANA comes with an option to install the Predictive Analysis Library which provides with the backend algorithms for many predictive use cases. These algorithms are available via functions and can be used directly in SQL, in SQLScript or in any other scenario.
Now, typically when people want to do something 'data sciency' they are looking for visualisations etc.
SAP has a solution for that - it's a separate program called "SAP Predictive Analytics" which can leverage the PA Library in SAP HANA.
Sorry, if this reads like a marketing plug, but that's the SAP offering.
If you want to use the SAP HANA PAL w/o additional software, I highly recommend to check out the YouTube videos of the SAP HANA Academy on that topic.
Hope that helps with getting you started.
The PAL documentation (available here) has a section on how to find out whether the PAL is already installed and working, and how to install it if it's not. These topics are covered in chapter 2.
There is also a graphical workflow tool (the Application Function Modeler) that makes your life much easier when you're working with the PAL. It doesn't generate graphical output in the sense of ROC curves and the like, but it gives you a nice overview over your workflow, in much the same spirit as KNIME, SAS Enterprise Miner, SPSS Modeler, and similar tools. So you can avoid using the slightly inconvenient SQL-API of the PAL.

How do SAP and Navision interact with third-party applications?

I am developing a business application and, provided that many companies look for integration, I would like to make it "compatible" with business systems like SAP or Navision. What mechanisms do these systems use for importing/exporting/syncing data with third-party applications?
There exist software tools known as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) whose purpose is to act as middleware to enable the integration of applications across a company.
Apache Camel is an example of such framework, but there exist many of them. You can find a comparison list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_business_integration_software
As the user nmiranda pointed out, in the case of SAP, the framework used for data interchange is SAP PI (SAP NetWeaver Process Integration).
I think your question was actually aimed to find this "starting point", wasn't it? I faced the same question some years ago and I also wondered if there was any "standard" interface to integrate applications. In such case, I hope have helped you.
There are multiple ways to integrate with ERP data sources. You can do batch integration where you setup a query that pulls the data from the source ERPs on a scheduled bases. ETL tools like Informatica and Talend shines on this front.
If you want online data integration when you want live data in your business application then you need to look at Data Virtualization solutions like Denodo, VirtDB or Composite.
Prices, feature sets, performance and flexibility highly differ. One distinguishing factor in my practice is security. Solutions tend to extract data into file system, which makes a problem when sensitive data is extracted. In real projects, implementors usually start a long process replicating the source system security objects in the target application.

mobilize SAP using SUP

I am an iOS developer. I am planning to do some sap back ended applications for iOS. when I Googled this, I realized that sybase has released sybase unwired platform(SUP) to mobilize the SAP.
I have few questions to explore regarding SUP:
What is the benefit of SUP when compared to another approach?
Is it possible to mobilize a big size SAP application also?
Should I need to do any special modification in SAP for this SUP?
Whether any other similar unwired platforms available in the market? If any please give some detail of it.
If anyone knows SUP Please direct me on the right path to explore.
Compared to which other approach? SUP make pretty easy accessing functionalities, reading data from and writing data to a SAP backend.
Yes, if you are willing to recode all screens for iOS. As far as I know SUP let you mobilize data and functionalities (if they are webservices or RFC's), but not a whole application without a frontend effort.
It will depend on how it was coded on the SAP backend. If you have RFC's for all of your needed functionalities, then you won't have to change anything.
I'm not aware of any, but take a look at SAP Project Gateway, which is more focused on small applications communicating through REST-based webservices with SAP backend.
If you want to learn SUP, check this SDN videos, and the Sybase Infocenter.
There is a product called SAP Netweaver Gateway in the ramp-up-process (like a beta for a couple of customers) that simplifies the access to SAP data via Rest Web Services (oData). Maybe you should investigate in this topic also.
Do you need to deploy to several devices?

What is a "pluggable" API?

I'm evaluating a piece of software (uPortal), and it lists one of its features as "Pluggable APIs."
I know what an API is, but have not heard the pluggable term before. What does it mean for an API to be "pluggable"?
It means that you can replace the implementation. Like a provider model, like ODBC database drivers - you can plug in drivers for various databases, using the same API.

What are ABAP and SAP? [closed]

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What are SAP and ABAP? I searched and got a bunch of different acronyms that don't quite make sense.
Is SAP a database engine?
Is ABAP a programming language?
Or are they nothing of that nature?
What are they primarily used for?
I have worked with SAP since 1998. SAP is a type of software called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) that large companies use to manage their day to day affairs. On the macro, the software can be split into two categories: Technical and Functional
Let's go Technical first, as it answers the "What is ABAP" part of your question.
Technical
There are two technical "stacks" within the SAP software, the first is the ABAP stack which is inclusive of all the original technology that SAP was. ABAP is the proprietary coding language for SAP to develop RICEFW objects (Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, Extensions, Forms and Workflows) within the ABAP stack.
The ABAP stack is traditionally navigated via Transaction Codes (T-Codes) to take you to different screens within the SAP Environment. From a technical perspective, you will do all of your performance and tuning of the WORK PROCESSES in the SAP system here, as well as configuring all of the system RFCs, building user profiles and also doing the necessary interfacing between the OS (usually Windows or HPUX) and the Oracle Database (currently Enterprise 11g).
The JAVA stack controls the "Netweaver" aspect of SAP which encapsulates SAP's ability to be accessed via the Internet via SAP Portal and it's ability to interface with other SAP and non-SAP legacy systems via Process Integration (PI).
SAP also has extensive capabilities in the Business Intelligence Field (BI) by accessing information stored within the Business Warehouse (BW). Currently, there is a new technology called HANA 1.0 that compresses the time to run reports against these repositories.
There are two primarily technologists that run ALL of these functions, they are called SAP Basis (Netweaver) Administrators and ABAP Developers.
Functional
SAP has specific pre-populated functional packages for different business areas. For example, Exxon runs the "IS Oil & Gas" package while Bank of America runs the "Banking" package, while further still Lockheed Martin runs the "Aerospace & Defense" package. These packages were developed over time by the amalgamation of intelligent functional customizations that could be intelligently ported to the system via inclusion in dot releases.
However, there are some vanilla functional modules that almost all entities run, regardless of their specific industry:
HR: Human Resources
PM: Project Management
FI: Financial
CO: Controllers
MM: Materials Management
SD: Sales and Distribution
PP: Production Planning
and finally the biggie:
MDM: Master Data Management which encapsulates the data for customer/vendor/material etc.
SAP is a company and offers a full Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, business platform, and the associated modules (financials, general ledger, &c).
ABAP is the primary programming language used to write SAP software and customizations. It would do it injustice to think of it as COBOL and SQL on steroids, but that gives you an idea. ABAP runs within the SAP system.
SAP and ABAP abstract the DB and run atop various underlying DBMSs.
SAP produces other things as well and even publicly says they dabble in Java and even produce a J2EE container, but tried-and-true SAP is ABAP through-and-through.
Attempt to provide simplified explanation:
SAP
Firstly it is a product.
Owner company, derives its name with the product name "SAP"
It is a management system (i.e. referred as ERP). Which means, this is a tool used for "managing the system" (domain specific - finance etc.).
Now, that SAP has created an environment around SAP. In order to operate in SAP environment (i.e. for customisations etc.), language-abstraction was required. Here comes ABAP.
ABAP
It is a language (high level), which is used in the SAP environment for customisations or new feature implementations.
It is high-level, because, it is known only in SAP environment.
Therefore, any customisation on the basic version of SAP given to some customer of SAP would require ABAP usage, otherwise, just delivered SAP is good enough for usage (i.e. no ABAP required).
Now is another term HANA.
HANA
This is an in-memory RDBMS.
Another tool/product by SAP, you would say, and its prime focus is to facilitate "analytics".
The way, this is designed, gives high compression (column-wise storage) and hence is majorly used for "READ" operations, which is why it is associated with "analysis".
SAP and HANA together abstracts the underlying complexity of database-access queries and UI (developed in java), together, to make the user experience good for the management system (used majorly in analytics, and so that the main focus stays in analytics). This very specific tool/product, is said as "technology", as it has an environment of its own (terminologies etc.). ABAP facilitates further development of the SAP-ERP.
The underlying development is in C, C++ (and ABAP) for SAP.
SAP SE is a German multinational that makes enterprise software. It is best known for SAP ERP and its predecessors (SAP R/2 & SAP R/3). As the name suggests, SAP ERP is an ERP system, which basically means that it supports a wide range of business processes from warehouse management and sales to HR, business intelligence, etc.
Although SAP ERP isn't the only software sold by SAP, people are typically refering to SAP ERP when they say "they're using SAP at work". It's important to note, though, that SAP is the name of the company and no software is sold or licensed as just "SAP".
ABAP is a 4GL programming language created by SAP, and commonly compared with OpenEdge ABL or COBOL. Much of SAP's software is written in ABAP. SAP provides an ABAP Workbench, which is a collection of tools that allows third party developers to develop, test and run custom ABAP programs within the SAP ERP system. The ABAP Workbench is typically used only when business logic cannot be implemented in SAP ERP by means of mere configuration.
with SAP, you might be referring to a popular business software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG
And according to Wikipedia, ABAP is a programming language (short for Advanced Business Application Programming) created by SAP AG.
In addition to all the regular confusion around SAP issues might also stem form the fact that SAP used to have their own DBMS ..
It used to be called Adabas (marketed originally by Nixdorf and then by Software AG) and was a quite popular DBMS for smaller SAP (the ERP solution) installations in Germany. At some point (AFAIK around 2000) SAP started to co-develop/support/take over Adabas and marketed it as SAP DB and later MaxDB under commercial and open-source licenses. There also was/is some agreement with MySQL.
But when people talk about SAP, they usually refer to the ERP solution as the other posters have noted.
SAP is just a company name and Abap or Abap/4 is a language programming. SAP company has a lot of products: ERP(material, sales, costs, financial), CRM, SRM, SCM and all of them are customizing and programmed with ABAP and Java. Basically is it.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG.
In short, SAP is a modular based application that sits on top of a database (as many applications do). Many people mistake SAP as being a database, but in fact it is just the application.
By 'modular based application' I mean that 'SAP Netweaver' is a bit like 'Microsoft Office' in that it is an application or set of applications that contains many components/modules. With SAP you can add modules (such as Finance, HR, Banking, Logistics, etc.) to meet your business requirements.
ABAP is a bespoke programming language that is used within SAP. SAP also now has components that are purely ABAP based, purely JAVA based or a mixture of the two. SAP can also integrate with other technologies such as .net and PHP.
SAP is really a big Company that offers incredible solutions oriented to medium-large companies.
Actually, I can say that the main IT products are: ERP, WEB, Human Resources, Integration, BI, Reports, Machine Learning, Mobile, Cloud, Robotics, and so on.
On the cloud, you can even find solutions using Cloud Foundry, NodeJS, HTML5, Java, etc.
It's really huge the solutions that offers to their customers.