ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) is the primary programming language supported on the SAP NetWeaver ABAP application server platform and applications that run on it, such as SAP ERP (formerly R/3), S/4HANA and CRM.

ABAP features are tightly coupled with the SAP R/3 or NetWeaver release that is being used. The only way to access new features of the language is to upgrade to a newer release of the ABAP application server. In many cases, programs written using features of a newer application server version will not run on older SAP systems.