Alistair C.

Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

Java for ABAP programmers Lesson 1

TM

The Chicken and the Egg.

Java is a funny language. The more you learn about it the more you love it. The problem
is where do you start to teach Java ?
TM

TM

Its a fully Object Orientated Language. This means that most people coming from an
ABAP environment will not have had any real exposure to OO concepts. (Hands up those
who have done the BC404). OO is very important to Java and some would say its
crucial.
Normally I wouldnt talk about Java at all for the first few lectures. I would talk about
Object Orientated principles. Inheritance, Polymorphism, Encapsulation and the like.
On the other hand its nice to see some Java to keep the excitement going.

The Chegg First then!

The compromise that most lecturers come up with is this. Lets have a look at a Hello
World type program and then well explore some OO basics and then back to Java.

Our First Program!

Lets have a look at a simple ABAP program.
REPORT ztestacr .
DATA: v_hello(11) TYPE c VALUE 'Hello World',
v_abapers(10) TYPE c VALUE 'of Abapers'.
START-OF-SELECTION.
WRITE: /, v_hello, v_abapers.

What will this produce? A list dialog with Hello World of Abapers. OK, now lets look
at the same thing in Java.

Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

ABAP is the registered trademark of SAP AG.
Java is the registered trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.

 Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

class HelloAbapers
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println(Hello World of Abapers);
}
}

Thats it! Thats your first program. Now we need to activate it, like we would activate
the ABAP program. In fact the process is somewhat similar. The Java program does not
compile to native code but rather to bytecode which is then interpreted by the Java
Virtual Machine. (More about the JVM later in the course). To do this we issue the
command javac HelloAbapers.java. The file weve just written must be saved with a
.java extension.
Lets see two separate examples on the same screen. One with errors and then one with
the errors corrected.

Lets have a look at the code weve just written. The first line defines the class. Notice I
havent defined a variable for my string in this example. Ill explain why when we cover
static variables.
Notice the curly brackets. This is how we define blocks in Java. They can be positioned
anywhere, but it looks a lot neater if they are lined up and indented. The first curly
bracket opens the class block.
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ABAP is the registered trademark of SAP AG.
Java is the registered trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.

 Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

The next line defines the method we are using. In our case the main method. Every
Java class that can be called or run directly from the command line, must contain a main
method.
Lastly lets look at the line that does the work. We call a System object that contains a
method println. (More about the notation later). This accepts a single parameter and
prints it on the screen. The parameter is the string.
Dont worry at this early stage about the cryptic things like public or static or args[].
Well cover these things as we go along.
Finally we need to know how to run the jolly program. From a command line we merely
type in java HelloAbapers.

That was easy! Obviously there is a bit more to Java than this. Stay tuned for the next
lesson where well start to explore the benefits of Object Orientation and what the
concepts mean.

End of Lesson 1

Alistair Rooney is an SAP ABAP consultant who also lectures Java 2 and OOA/OOD. He has 20 years IT experience ranging from
operator to IT Manager. He is a member of the Institute of IT Management (London) and a member of the British Computer Society.
He currently lives in Durban, South Africa and is married with 2 children, a cat and several unwanted moles in the lawn.

Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

ABAP is the registered trademark of SAP AG.
Java is the registered trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.

 Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

Lesson 2 Object Orientation in a nutshell

Help me, let me out Im trapped in this nutshell..Thats me in a nutshell: Austin Powers

The Nutshell Encapsulation.

Fantasize for a moment that you needed to speak to Bill Gates. Unless youre a big wig in
IT the chances of you speaking directly to him are small. You will probably deal with one
or many intermediaries. They will listen to your ideas and pass them on to Steve Ballmer
who may not even pass then on to Bill.
Thats how encapsulation works. You dont get direct access to the private data within a
class. These are hidden from you. Dont feel offended, its really for your own good. You
need to use special methods to fetch this data for you or even change it.
Since the data may not be changed directly and only through these methods, we can be
confident that we have not changed the way the class works. Now heres the bonus. We
dont have to test it or worry that its doing what we want. It is a black box that we can
trust will do the job. Java has a lot of these really neat classes available for use. Theyre
called APIs. Kind of like super Function Modules. More about these later.
Back to our nutshell. The simple diagram below illustrates this. See how the private data
is protected by the methods. In Java we call the Accessor or Mutator methods.

Data
Methods()

Lets look at another concept within OO. Inheritance.

Inheritance & Polymorphism.

Meet Joe Soap. Hes an FI Consultant, but he wants to go further. He wants to specialize
in Treasury. Thats ok. He does some extra training, becomes better at Treasury and is
now a more specialized consultant. Is he any less of an FI Consultant? No, of course not,
he still retains all that good experience he built up. Lets see that diagrammatically:
FI Consultant

Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

ABAP is the registered trademark of SAP AG.
Java is the registered trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.

 Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

FI:TR Consultant

We could say that the TR consultant is a more specialized FI consultant. We could also
say that the TR consultant Inherits all of the FI consultants Attributes and
Behaviours.
Lets take a more accurate analogy now. Lets look at a Shape. We dont know what kind
of shape it is, but it has some common attributes with all shapes. It has an area and it has
a colour. Now we can give it a behaviour. A good example is that a shape knows how to
calculate its area.
Again a diagram will illustrate this. Notice the two attributes and the one behaviour. This
is how we draw them in UML. (Unified Modelling Language).
-

Shape
Area
Colour

+ calcArea(x,y)

Now heres where it gets interesting. We can now create three more specialized shapes
that will inherit the attributes and behaviours from the Shape class. We call these subclasses. From their perspective we call Shape the super-class.
Square
+ calcArea(x,y)

Circle
+ calcArea(r)

Triangle
+ calcArea(x,y,z)

The variables defined inside the brackets loosely equate to exporting/importing functions
(depending where you look at them) for a function module. Bear in mind that these are
always the parameters being passed to a method. (Or the message in UML speak).
Notice that they are different in two of the classes (Circle, Triangle) and they are the
same for the Square. The Square class is said to have Overridden the calcArea method
from the superclass. The other two classes are said to have Overloaded the method.

Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

ABAP is the registered trademark of SAP AG.
Java is the registered trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.

 Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

Again, Ill go into greater detail on these later. Essentially the difference is that the
method signature is the same for the Square and different for the others. This is the
essence of polymorphism. In later lessons Ill explain the concept of late-binding which
makes this powerful in Java.

Real World objects and the Conceptual model (A UML glimpse)

This is not the right place for the details, but several companies with the right resources
have done studies on OO versus non-OO before investing serious money in changing
their methodology to an Object Orientated Approach. To my knowledge, none have been
able to refute the claim that it is a far more efficient methodology.
Boeing is a case in point. (Sharble and Cohen, 1994).
Im going to introduce you to one of the most common artefacts (UML document) , the
Conceptual Model. There are many more documents that can be used by OO and I would
strongly encourage people to do more research on the subject. It will make you a better
Java programmer. It will also enable you to write truly re-usable code.
(See http://uml.tutorials.trireme.com/uml_tutorial_navigation.htm)
Lets take a look at a video store for an example. (Most people can relate to that).
Firstly we make a list of Candidate classes or Concepts.
Assistant.
Video.
Video Catalogue.
Customer.
Video Store.
Loan.

There are a number

of techniques used to extract these candidates, but we wont cover it
1
here. We can now start to build associations between our classes. This would start to
give us
an indication of the responsibilities
of each class, which
Assistant
Customer
Videois a very important
aspect of OO.
name
VideoID
The following diagram illustrates this more fully.
1..*

Handles >

0..1

Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights

reserved
Catalogue
ABAP is the registered trademark of SAP AG.
Java is the registered trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.

Loan
dueDate

1
VideoStore
1

 Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

*
Borrows >

Records

0..1
*
< LendsVideoTo

< Employs

RecordsStorageOf >

< Maintains

Notice the numbering of relationships. 1 to many, 1 to 1 etc.

Well thats a very brief introduction to the wonderful world of UML/OO. Ive heard
people say that it takes 6 months to a year to convert a procedural programmer to an
Object Oriented programmer. You can only benefit from learning and applying OO so
stick with it! Personally I wouldnt put a time on it. It depends how keen you are.
Thats the end of Lesson 2. Sometime in the future Ill put together a full UML course. If
this is something youd be interested in email me at [email protected] so I can gauge
the interest.
In Lesson 3 well explore some Java Basics, such as the primitive data types.

Alistair C. Rooney 2002 All rights reserved

ABAP is the registered trademark of SAP AG.
Java is the registered trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.