SAP just announced the general availability of Joule for developers and ABAP AI capabilities. As is frequently the case, this generated a lot of buzz and excitement but also confusion in the ABAP developer community. Below I will try to answer some of the questions we see around this announcement. This post is based on publicly available resources, some of which are also called out in the SAP Community blog post-Joule speaks ABAP by Alexander Rother.
Where is this available?
Currently, Joule for ABAP is available in “SAP BTP ABAP Environment and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition with release 2502.” Many people are asking when it will be available in the other releases. SAP is “looking into” adding it to the private edition of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, but there isn’t a specific ETA. Availability in S/4HANA on-premise, much less ECC, is rather doubtful at this point.
Is it available in the ABAP trial?
Per FAQ document, “So far, the existing trial environment is not connected to Joule’s ABAP developer capabilities.” This is a big disappointment. It means that Joule for ABAP will not be available for the vast majority of developers. Which in turn means fewer developers providing feedback and helping to improve the product.
Is it free?
For a limited time. “[…]additional license: 8019124 – Joule for developers limited promotion, ABAP. Please check SAP Note 3571857 for details. This license is a limited promotion free of charge until September 15th, 2025, and can be purchased until August 15th, 2025.”
How do I get/install it?
Oddly, I was unable to find any clear instructions on this. The ‘Start’ section in the documentation is barren. The blog post linked a tutorial but the tutorial just starts with “[…]you need the latest version of the ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse (ADT) on your laptop or PC and the access to a suitable ABAP system that is connected to the SAP AI Core.” Note the connection to SAP AI Core isn’t explicitly mentioned elsewhere and it’s not clear how it might affect the availability or cost.
What can Joule for ABAP do for me?
Let’s check the documentation for available features.
- Chat: answer questions about ABAP, specific code opened, “generation of code examples for specific development contexts”. This is probably faster and more convenient than using ABAP Help, Google, or asking a colleague. But is it worth the cost? Hard to tell.
- Predictive Code Completion might save time on typing some boilerplate code but might as well become a nuisance like some AI assistants being added everywhere these days. In the demos (see the links below), I didn’t appreciate the disregard of Clean ABAP in the proposed code. Also, it is something the developers already expect from a modern IDE at no extra cost.
- Explain: this could be useful for beginners or functional consultants who don’t know ABAP. For experienced developers, I’d expect this to be of limited use. First, explanations are just not very helpful (e.g. CDS view called I_BusinessPartner provides information about… business partners). Second, usually, the big question is not “What does this code do?” but “Why did someone put this code here?” And no AI would be able to answer this. Also, out of curiosity, I took an example from a Joule demo and asked ChatGPT to explain the code. I think it actually did a much better job but to be fair, the demo showed a preview Joule version.
- ABAP Unit – this is probably the most useful feature. However, I expect this to be affected by the same issues as derail any efforts to bring unit testing into ABAP. To make use of ABAP Unit, you need to begin with writing testable code. And it’s a whole different story. Also, let’s face it, unit tests are usually not factored into a typical SAP project timeline.
Bonus feature: generating a full RAP application is mentioned in the FAQ document but appears to be coming out later this year. However, RAP Generator is already available right now and is free to use. It also looks like SAP adopted it as ABAP Repository Objects Wizard.
Is there a demo?
SAP will likely share more videos now that this is generally available. So far, there is a very short promotional video that skips very fast over the interesting parts. For a better impression, take a look at the Joule preview demo in this Devtoberfest 2024 video.
