You should have heard this rumours more than once.

The story goes like this:

Well the sad news is that SAP is integrating ABAP with JAVA.  So in near future ABAP will be obsolete and JAVA will be in.   Then the field will be so much populated by java programmers that it will be going to be the 
end to ABAPers as JAVApers programmers will be having more value because of their Java experience.
So I think now we should start making move to Jave, at least to fight in the market even if we can't dominate it.

or 

Heard some rumours here and there that the eventual plan for SAP is to phrase out ABAP programming? In another word, in a few years time, ABAPers will be redundant.   How true is that?? Care to comment ??

or

I have just started my journey into ABAP programming, but I am being discouraged by some people who say, that ABAP is gonna be transitioned out and will be replaced by something else. Just wanted to know how true this is and if I should continue on the track I have taken, cause I dont wanna regret my decision later.
 

Some response to the above worries :-

This rumours have been around for a couple of years. In the past many programming languages have also become obsolute. 
Why waste time worrying about this?  I think abapers should spend more times to learn other sap modules to enhance their value.
 

ABAP can't die because its the easiest development tool . It can be easily seen that if you see development cost ABAP development can be completed in less time as compared to Java.  And SAP is not stopping ABAP but just given an option to develop in java. However it will be good for ABAP Developers to learn java. 
 

ABAP is not a replacement for any thing and at the same time no other language is a replacement for ABAP.  FYI, ABAP is no more an ABAP/4. It is widely extended with the introduction of Web Application Server starting from release WAS 620. 

In Object Oriented Paradigm ABAP is the only langauge that goes very near to all the properties of OOP concepts even comparted to JAVA and C++ starting from release WAS 630. You can developed and extend web applications using ABAP. It is much much more than what we see from R/2 and R/3 3.X releases...

There is nothing to worry about it. Yes SAP is introducing J2EE platform as an alternate to make an implementation faster as in the market there are many JAVA developers compared to ABAP resources. 

More than this, ABAP is the SAP proprietary language. Except R/3 kernel, every application/transaction including BASIS is written in ABAP. I don't think SAP is that foolish to replace ABAP with some thing else. Look at the development news in SAP AG official web site for more info. One might need to know Java and JSP for developing mySAP portals but starting from SAP NetWeaver (which is planned to be released officially by the next quarter this year) you can developed 
heterogeneous portals using ABAP itself... 

Hope the above clarifies how ABAP is moving a head in the programming era. 

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