Special features and the larger ABAP infrastructure

ABAP doesn’t stand alone, and it is highly integrated with other features of the SAP NetWeaver ABAP application server. Among these are the following :-

Logical database connections, which allow code to be abstracted from a specific database. The actual database connections are configured outside of ABAP code, allowing the same code to be used in different database environments.
Open SQL, an abstraction of SQL syntax that is part of the ABAP language and which the ABAP runtime environment converts to native SQL that is appropriate for the database being used. Open SQL has many similarities to Microsoft .NET’s Language Integrated Query (LINQ) concept.
Internal Tables, which hold collections of objects that are accessed using special language keywords or Open SQL. This ABAP concept contrasts with the concept of typed arrays like in Java or C++.
Security, in which ABAP is integrated with SAP NetWeaver’s security infrastructure.
Data Dictionary, a universal dictionary of data structure definitions, often including business logic, which is available to all ABAP programs in a system.
Change and Transport System (CTS), which tracks changes to development objects and manages the promotion of development objects to quality assurance and production environments.
Shared development system, which is an important aspect of ABAP. ABAP differs from most newer languages in that development usually takes place on a shared system, with all developers working on the same set of development objects at the same time.