Is BDC outdated? What is BAPI? LSMW?

Hi,

I was speaking with one of our ABAP programmers here and he said that BDC is outdated and no longer supported by SAP and that they rarely use SHDB. He said that they use BAPI to call transactions from programs. Is this the case? Can someone please provide some example code that uses BAPI? Also, what is LSMW?

Also, can someone provide example code for a selection screen? He also said they use selection screens to program the gui's and rarely program each object or data element.

thanks,

Kevin