The "SAP Certified Development Associate - ABAP with SAP NetWeaver 7.50" certification exam verifies that the candidate possesses foundational knowledge in the area of ABAP Development. This certificate proves that the candidate has a fundamental understanding within the Development Consultant profile and is able to apply the associated prerequisite skills practically under supervision of an expert consultant in a project environment.

ABAP stands for Advanced Business Application Programming, a 4GL (4th generation) language. Currently it is positioned, along with Java, as the main language for SAP application server programming.

ABAP programs reside inside the SAP database. They execute under the control of the runtime system that is a part of the SAP kernel. The run-time system processes all ABAP statements, controlling the flow logic and responding to user events.

So, unlike C++ and Java, ABAP programs are not stored in separate external files. Inside the database, ABAP code exists in two forms −

Source code that can be viewed and edited with the ABAP workbench tools.

Generated code, which is a binary representation. If you are familiar with Java, this generated code is somewhat comparable with Java byte code.

The run-time system can be considered as a virtual machine, just similar to Java virtual machine. A key component of the ABAP run-time system is the database interface that turns database independent statements (Open SQL) into the statements understood by the underlying database (Native SQL). SAP can work with a wide variety of databases and the same ABAP program can run on all of those.