Which kind of interfaces do ALE business processes use in SAP?

ALE business processes are integrated processes across distributed systems, requiring interfaces between the systems.

These interfaces have to be stable to enable the communication between different releases and to reduce the impact of release changes within the distributed environment.

In SAP R/3 release 3.0 and 3.1 ALE uses IDocs as interfaces. An IDocs is a data container for transferring messages asynchronously.

They are release independent. Since SAP Release 3.1G BAPIs are a new type of object oriented, stable interfaces that can be called synchronously or asynchronously.

Asynchronous BAPIs use IDocs as data containers. ALE business processes can use BAPIs as well. In the future new ALE business processes will use BAPIs as interfaces. But the existing IDocs will still be supported.

In time, BAPIs will be created with similar functionality to existing IDoc interfaces.