Features

Why SOA Needs Cloud Computing - Part 1

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:00:00 EST

It’s Thursday morning, you’re the CEO of a large, publicly traded company, and you just called your executives into the conference room for the exciting news. The board of directors has approved the acquisition of a key competitor, and you’re looking for a call-to-action to get everyone planning for the next steps.

PowerBuilder UI Designer

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:00:00 EST

PowerToTheBuilder.com is a PowerBuilder developer’s source for free, open source, high-quality user interface controls. Using any number of the controls available can provide your application with an instant facelift. Integration is easy and becomes less complicated based on the knowledge you have of your own application.

An Application Suite for PowerBuilder Developers

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST

Novalys, creator of tools for developers since 1998, is an active part of the PowerBuilder community. We create applications to make development faster and easier. Our clients span the globe. This year, we are proud to announce the addition of two new products to our line-up. Novalys prides itself on responding to the real needs of PowerBuilder developers. If you find yourself in one of the following situations, we have a solution to help you. In an upcoming series of articles, we will develop each situation further.

Implement a Calendar Component in PowerBuilder Applications

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:15:00 EDT

Those who answer to users probably agree that the style of the PowerBuilder applications have remained unchanged for far too long. While major improvements are anticipated with the release of the PowerBuilder 12 beta, developers who would like a quick face-lift for their applications are invited to continue reading here.

The New Generation of Decompilers

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EDT

The latest development technologies rely on intermediate languages and can be decompiled. PowerBuilder is no exception. In this article, we will address the risks posed by decompilers. We will also discuss what can be done to protect against the possible negative results of decompilation – whether you create in-house applications, commercial applications, or are using these applications for your business.

Using the Microsoft Chart Controls in PowerBuilder

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:45:00 EDT

You may not be aware of this, but Microsoft now provides a rather powerful charting control free of charge as an add-in for .NET 3.5. It’s available for download at http://xrl.us/ben3pm. Because it supports 35 different chart types (see Figure 1), it can add significant new charting capability to PowerBuilder applications.

Migrating Legacy Client/Server PowerBuilder Apps

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:00:00 EDT

In today’s competitive IT environment, organizations are reducing development and maintenance costs, and improving the accessibility of their legacy applications. With the growth in technology and demand for n-tier architecture-based applications, corporations now have an opportunity to transform their “legacy” client/server PowerBuilder applications to Web-enabled PowerBuilder applications by migrating to PowerBuilder 11.0.

PowerDesigner 15: Expanding Data Modeling into Your Enterprise

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:00:00 EDT

In today’s business world change is a constant and companies need to ensure that they keep up with that change. Whether the change is an opportunistic response to new conditions – requirements, regulations, market conditions, a merger/acquisition – or a major transformation, companies need the power to succeed and that power is knowledge.

PowerBuilder and .NET: Development Strategy

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:30:00 EDT

Nowadays .NET has become a mainstream programming platform. To be inline with PowerBuilder’s .NET deployment and .NET development strategy, the PowerScript language will be enhanced to be a true CLS-compliant .NET language in PowerBuilder 12. Users will be able to consume and extend any CLS-compliant .NET resource, thereby saving them a lot of development time.

How to Communicate with a DBMS

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:45:00 EDT

Yes size really does matter when you are talking about a client/server application, web server, or application server communicating with a database management system. Size is often overlooked when designing very large application systems that can potentially generate an excessive amount of concurrent users, heavy database transaction load, complex queries, large data stream content or some type of mixture of the above.

Methods for Faster and Efficient Data Entry in DataWindows

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:45:00 EDT

Software that is not used is useless. Facing the challenge that doctors prefer to spend time with their patients rather than facing the monitor, we have fine-tuned methods in our DataWindow-based forms so that user entry is quick, painless, and a pleasure. These include the use of dropdown lists and DataWindows for efficient, correct and faster entries, in addition to accurately filling in text columns with limited keyboard entry. Visual guides and markers for data in relation to patient images are also provided.

Visual Studio 2008 Integration with SCM Tools

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:00:00 EDT

This article describes the integration between the SCM AllFusion Harvest Version Control Interface (VCI) and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 for version control. It will show how to make the necessary connections using the interface, demonstrate check-outs and check-ins, how to delete files in proper order using SCM tools, demonstrate file comparison and how to exclude files, add new files, load the initial baseline via the Visual Studio IDE and promote the Change Request (CR) Package in SCM AllFusion Harvest through the entire lifecycle leaving the initial baseline footprint across all SCM AllFusion Harvest states.

Modeling Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:15:00 EDT

How do you establish agile enterprise architecture? How can you rapidly develop and deploy applications to satisfy or even lead the market demand? Many enterprises are constructing and reorganizing the architecture using the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, we may all encounter some problems when applying SOA using some existing development processes and notations, such as object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD), enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks, and business process modeling (BPM).

New Features in PowerBuilder 11.5

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:00:00 EDT

In the previous articles in this series, we looked at FDCC changes (part 1) and GUI enhancements (part 2) in PowerBuilder 11.5. In this article, we’ll be looking at the enhancements that were added to PowerBuilder 11.5 that are specifically related to .NET targets. The one thing we won’t be covering in this regard is the .NET security enhancements that were covered in a previous PBDJ article: “Applying Code Access Security in PowerBuilder .NET Applications” by Maggie Lv.

New Features in PowerBuilder 11.5 – Part 2

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:15:00 EDT

This is the second part of an ongoing series about the new features that were added in PowerBuilder 11.5. In the first part, we looked at the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) and the impact it had on developers. In this part, we’re going to look at a number of the improvements in GUI functionality. We’ll start that by comparing a couple of screenshots of images in DataWindows (Figure 1 and Figure 2), which demonstrate a number of these new functions.

QweryBuilder: A PowerBuilder Application

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:45:00 EDT

QweryBuilder is a database development tool designed and developed in PowerBuilder. Its purpose is to use innovative ideas and techniques to make database development and data retrieval easy and intuitive. It currently works against Sybase ASE, iAnywhere SQL Anywhere, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. An evaluation version of the application can be downloaded from www.Werysoft.com.

Getting Enterprise Data onto Multiple Platforms

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:00:00 EDT

No one would argue that the world is mobile. Let’s discuss how mobility is impacting business on a global level. Currently we have explosive data growth leading to information everywhere. What is critical is access to useful information anywhere, anytime. End users want convenience, enterprises want ROI. Wireless now is everywhere and coverage is strong and constantly improving.

New Features in PowerBuilder 11.5

Thu, 28 May 2009 12:45:00 EDT

I plan to make this the first of a series of articles that discuss the new features in PowerBuilder 11.5, which was released late last year. Of course, they won’t be the first articles we’ve run on the topic, as we ran an article on the new Code Access Security features back even before 11.5 was released and a more recent article on New DataWindow Features. This series of articles is intended to discuss the major hitters of the remaining features.

Supporting Events from .NET Visual Components in PowerBuilder

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:30:00 EDT

This article seems like it should be the fourth in a series of articles. The first two were on non-visual components in August 2006 and July of 2007. The last one was in August of 2007. In that one, we looked at using the Interop Forms Toolkit to provide a COM wrapper for Visual .NET components – essentially making them ActiveX controls – so that PowerBuilder could use them.

Consuming a SQL Anywhere Native Web Service Using a .NET Client

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:45:00 EDT

Enabling interoperability is one of the greatest benefits of using web services. In the business world, applications work on different platforms with different operating systems running applications whose programming languages vary wildly. For applications to interact with each other there should be a common method to transparently talk to all the different systems.

Supporting Oracle Failover in PowerBuilder Applications

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:15:00 EDT

Oracle has provided support for failing over database connections and, through Transparent Application Failover (TAF), doing so in a way that allows connected applications to continue functioning relatively uninterrupted during and after the failover. The connected application has to work with the Oracle client layer to participate in the failover, rather than just erroring out when the original connection is lost.

Using EAServer 6.2 Export Configurations

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:30:00 EDT

Version 5.x of EAServer allowed easy synchronization of components or packages among different servers, or a cluster of servers. Just right-click on the package or component, choose “Synchronize,” add any necessary addressing information for target servers, and click “OK.” The user interface that you use for EAServer management has changed dramatically between version 5 and version 6.x, switching to a browser-based console.

PowerBuilder with FusionCharts

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 12:00:00 EST

Back in August of 2007, I wrote an article entitled "Dynamically Generating Next-Generation Charts from PowerBuilder DataWindows" that demonstrated one method of dynamically generating Flash charts from within a PowerBuilder application. I was primarily writing that from the perspective of writing standard client/server applications. PowerBuilder 11 was just freshly released, and so while the option of creating WebForm applications that incorporated the technology was a factor that was being considered, it wasn’t part of the sample at that time.

PowerBuilder Developer's View of SQL Anywhere DBMS – Part 2

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:13:00 EST

For this article I'll focus on SQL Anywhere version 10 and PowerBuilder 11.0. Some of the features reviewed may not be supported in previous versions of these software releases. In Part 1 I discussed the installation of SQL Anywhere, developing a schema, and the Database Painter. In Part 2 I will continue the discussion on the Database Painter as well as tracking database changes.

Building a Scoreboard in PowerBuilder

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:15:00 EST

My favorite sport is artistic roller skating, where I act as the tabulator. It’s a wonderful sport, a bit like ice skating, except that most events are skated on quad skates (four wheels in a rectangular layout). We do freestyle (with jumps and spins), figure skating (on the circles), and dance. A few of us do inline skating, too. We had a tabulating program: a Visual Basic 3 application.

Implementation of an Object-Relational Mapping Service

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:15:00 EST

TecnoTRENDS has been using PowerBuilder as its main development platform for years. The ultimate reason for choosing PowerBuilder was the versatility of the Sybase DataWindow control available under this platform. In short, the DataWindow control provides a significant productivity boost in the development cycle by making both the manipulation and visualization of relational data a simple task.

Building .NET Web Applications the Easy Way

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:15:00 EST

In the last few years many customers I consult for have asked how to modernize their PowerBuilder applications and their development skill set. They want to go to the Web, they want to embrace .NET, and, in general, they don't want to fall behind. I can sense their anxiety, but there are some good approaches that make this transition relatively quick and easy. This article is intended to help all those in this predicament.

A PowerBuilder Developer’s View of the SQL Anywhere DBMS

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:40:00 EST

When you start to develop mission-critical business applications using your favorite development tool, you should seriously consider iAnywhere's SQL Anywhere database management system to support the data management requirements. The iAnywhere company is a subsidiary of Sybase. In the middle 1990s, Sybase acquired along with Powersoft's PowerBuilder product a company from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, known as Watcom.

PowerBuilder's .NET Strategy

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:30:00 EST

.NET has become a mainstream programming platform. To be in line with PowerBuilder's .NET strategy (.NET deployment and .NET development), PB11 introduced many .NET-related features: its .NET compiler enables users to develop .NET Windows Forms (including SmartClient) applications and ASP.NET Web Forms (including AJAX-enabled) applications with functionality similar to PB’s native pcode compiler.

An Electronic File Cabinet in PowerBuilder

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:00:00 EST

Even the best physical filing systems have drawbacks: the cost of storage space, the need to pay rent for records that have to be kept off-site, the time it takes to locate and refile documents, and, of course, the time wasted finding lost or misfiled documents. You might even have a designated "librarian" who is the only person allowed to file documents. If you store microfilm, it becomes even more cumbersome, since special equipment is needed to view and print copies, and searching a roll of microfilm is slow and tedious.

New DataWindow Features in PowerBuilder 11.5

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:30:00 EST

In PowerBuilder 11.5 we introduce features that allow you to easily give your existing DataWindows a new look and feel. New properties are added to columns and controls to allow you to add tooltips. You no longer have to settle for single-colored backgrounds. We have introduced properties to control color gradients and translucency for the background of columns, and most controls and bands.

Providing Maximum Efficiency with Virtualization Technologies

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 19:00:00 EST

Virtualization is actively being used by Sybase IT to help solve power/cooling issues as well as transform the datacenter into an environment that brings greater benefits to their customers, especially the engineering organization. Average CPU utilization was very low on physical servers and through virtualization this has improved considerably.

The Pitfalls of Creating Data in an Occasionally Connected Application

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:00:00 EST

Up until recently, Web applications were "connected-only" applications. Users could only use the application by connecting to the central server and all data access was done in a single place. For many years, people accepted that was the limitation of Web applications. But it isn't a limitation any longer.

XNA or Game Development for Everyone - Part 2

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:50:00 EST

In Part 1 we started to develop a small racing game using XNA Game Studio Express 2.0. We learned about the game loop and how it's implemented by the XNA (by using the Update and Draw methods) framework. We also created our first track on the screen and four cars started moving on the screen, but, sadly enough, they left the track and weren't seen again. What does that mean?

How to Use PowerBuilder .NET Applications on Linux

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:30:00 EDT

With PowerBuilder 11 Sybase gave developers what we have long hoped for – the possibility of taking an application created in a client/server architecture and turning it into a Web application, almost without having to move the code; and it's better if you don't use a server application. Once the Web Form application is ready, it looks like I have a "multi-platform" application and any operating system can use it.

Deploying PowerBuilder Applications as ASP.NET WebForm Applications

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:00:00 EDT

PowerBuilder 11.0 supports deploying existing PowerBuilder client/server business applications as an ASP.NET WebForm application. This greatly improves developer productivity without having to learn a new development language and preserves PowerBuilder development skills. Although the deployed WebForm application retains all the functionality of its original client/server application, due to the technological shift in the running environment from a two-tier client/server environment to a three-tier Web paradigm, some features of PowerScript will not be supported in a Web environment.

XNA, Game Development for Everyone

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:36:00 EDT

Maybe some of you remember a time when we created a sprite on a piece of graph paper and afterwards hacked zeroes and ones in so we could see something eventually move on a TV screen. I have to admit that those days have been gone for a long time and a lot of things have happened in IT since I developed simple games on my C64. And one of these new things is XNA Game Studio (the current version is 2.0).

Securing PowerBuilder Applications

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:04:00 EDT

PowerBuilder 11's .NET support may be welcomed by developers looking to expand their horizons and take further advantage of SOA, yet developing in this environment also introduces new threats. Applications developed using the Microsoft .NET platform inherently expose the intellectual property they contain much more than their native compiled counterparts.

Solutions for Optimizing ASP.NET Applications

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:30:00 EDT

One of the reasons that ASP.NET has become popular as a framework for Web developers is the availability of third-party controls and tools. This third-party product support means that, when you’re developing features and functionality in an ASP.NET application, you have "buy versus build" options in many areas. Usually, if the options are buying a third-party control or rolling up your sleeves and manually coding the solution yourself, the choice is an easy one.

Converting from ASA to ASE

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:00:00 EDT

Most new users of PowerBuilder start with SQL Anywhere as the back-end database engine (formerly Adaptive Server Anywhere or ASA, and before that Watcom). With growth, a need to shift and adapt to a wider database platform is thrust on developers by customers. A recent exercise in this regard, besides re-emphasizing our past amateurishness, has also helped us make a clean, lean application.