Latest News from PowerBuilder Journal

PowerBuilder on the iPad?

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:00:00 EDT

As you may have noticed, a number of media sources are writing about the overall progression of iOS device sales and of the iPad in particular. The latter’s sales have developed to the point where their presence in businesses is becoming indispensable (see Looking into Enterprise iOS by Ian Thain) This article is intended for PowerBuilder users who are considering developing iPad applications. We will try to determine to what point this device has become a must-have, by looking at recent sales and market penetration figures in the professional world. Then, we will discuss development tools and solutions that are adapted to PowerBuilder projects.

PowerBuilder 15 Classic Sneak Preview

Fri, 04 May 2012 11:00:00 EDT

In my previous article for PowerBuilder Developer’s Journal (Vol. 18 issue 8), I gave a sneak preview of some of the things we were working on for PB15 Classic. This is a closer look at one of them – Tabs and Docking in MDI Windows. Recall that in the article we mentioned adding two new WindowType values – mdidock! and mdidockhelp! – to the window object. Like values mdi! and mdihelp!, respectively, they allow child windows (sheets) to be opened with the OpenSheet functions. But these sheets will behave differently: they can dock, float and be tabbed like the windows you see in our PB.NET IDE. Your sheets will open docked by default (we will see how to control this later in the article).

What PowerBuilder Users Are Planning for Mobile Development

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:30:00 EDT

The first sets of results are in for the Mobile Development Survey. After only a few weeks of release, there have been hundreds of responses from PowerBuilder users. Here’s a little sneak peek at some of the results we’ve compiled so far: The eternal battle between Android and Apple-iOS continues, so which platforms are a must for organizations developing with PowerBuilder? Eighty-seven percent are looking to use Android, with Apple not far behind at 77%. It’s no surprise that the two OS industry leaders are strongly represented in the survey. However, Windows Phone 7, representing only 1.5% of today’s smartphone market sales, has taken a surprising third place. This is in line with the predictions of certain analysts, who see a successful return of Microsoft on the OS mobile market. Only time will tell if these predictions will come true…

What Ever Happened to ‘Device Convergence’?

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:00:00 EDT

I’m sitting here at yet another user group meeting… perhaps you’ve seen me at one or at TechWave, or perhaps you have seen pictures of me at them on Facebook. I’ve got a laptop propped open where I’m usually working on some pet sample code project. Next to it is my iPad in its case/stand with an external keyboard where I’m taking notes on the event for my WordPress blog and perhaps sending out Twitter updates. Next to that is my Android smartphone so I can text message, go on Facebook, and take still photos of the event. And somewhere in the general vicinity is the Panasonic Lumix camera I’m using to record video of the event in case I need to refer to it later to clarify some of the notes I’m taking on the iPad. Finally, if I’m lucky, I’ve got a multi-outlet strip running to a nearby outlet so I can keep all these devices powered up.

SAP Buys US Mobile Platform House Syclo

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EDT

German giant SAP said Tuesday, after getting back from the long weekend, that it’s going to buy privately held Chicago-based Syclo, a long-established company with a mobile enterprise application platform called Agentry and packaged ERP and CRM apps. Terms weren’t disclosed. The deal should close this quarter. Syclo has expertise in building applications for utilities, oil & gas, life sciences and manufacturing and counts 600 customers around the world. SAP said the acquisition “adds momentum to our already powerful mobile portfolio, advancing our vision and leadership while accelerating our mobile apps.” And where there are mobile apps, there’s a cloud. SAP is on the trail of seeing €20 in total annual revenues by 2015 versus €14.2 billion last year tickled by mobile solutions.

Perhaps I Haven’t Made Myself Clear...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 07:45:00 EDT

I’ve been discussing HTML5 for some time now. In July of 2010, I mentioned that I wasn’t particularly concerned about PowerBuilder supporting HTML5 in the initial PowerBuilder.NET release (12.5) because: “HTML5 is largely still in its infancy, and there appears to be too much opportunity for it to fragment as previous HTML standards have done.” [1] In December of 2010 I devoted an entire editorial to HTML5 [2], noting that: “I have some basic concerns that make me reluctant to recommend using HTML5 as the basis for any line of business application development in the near future.”

QweryBuilder Tips and Tricks

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:00:00 EDT

QweryBuilder contains some very neat features. We try our best to ensure that most functionality is well exposed and intuitive to find; In some cases this is hard to do. Below are a few that we think you will find useful. Use the Ctrl-D keyboard shortcut to duplicate the current line. If text is selected, the selected text will be duplicated. Use the Ctrl-T keyboard shortcut to swap the current Werysoft Inc.http://www.blogger.com/profile/04726066291902301395noreply@blogger.com0

TechWave into TechEd Does Go!!!

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:45:00 EDT

I just received an interesting piece of information today from the Events team. Let me share it with you... For 2012, our traditional TechWave content will be incorporated into the SAP TechEd conference, taking place October 15-19 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. We will continue to deliver targeted training on Sybase products as you would expect, plus offer attendees access to SAP TechEd keynote sessions, exhibits, special event and other networking functions.

Five Points When Building the Business Case for Mobile Enterprise Apps

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:45:00 EDT

Today I thought I would put together five steps and five points within to producing 5-Star Mobile Apps. Here is #1 Five points when Building the Business Case for Mobile Enterprise Apps. 1. Create a Visionary Plan for more mobile Apps and know how they will aid and shape your enterprise. 2. Create an ADS (Application Definition Statement) for each App, specifying purpose and intended audience. 3. Create a Budget for devices, if CYOD and include the next two steps. Also include your estimated ROI. 4. Create a plan for a Device Management & Security Infrastructure - Use a leading MDM such as Afaria. 5. Create a plan for an App Dev Team using a future proof Development Platform - Use a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP), such as SUP.

The PowerBuilder DataWindow as an Image Thumbnail Display Control

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:30:00 EDT

While external controls exist for viewing image thumbnails, there can be the need to view images as thumbnails within the context of other data within a multi-row list, treeview or report. This can be easily done with a PowerBuilder DataWindow object. In this case a treeview DataWindow (see Figure 1) was needed to display multiple images as thumbnails that related to the data presented in each row. Required functionalities include making the images selectable, displaying data for each thumbnail, such as the name of the file, and to keep the appearance orderly by having the images appear the same height in a row. I will present the techniques used to create thumbnail images in DataWindows. The methods presented assume that the images are stored as files in some folder that’s accessible by the application. It’s also assumed that the image types are any of the standard image types that are recognized by PowerBuilder: .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .wmf, and .png. The image files are not converted in any way but are displayed in a thumbnail size.

PowerBuilder Mobile

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 20:39:00 EDT

Are you a PowerBuilder developer and is your organization considering developing Mobile applications? Then your help is needed! Who is going mobile? Discover what PowerBuilder Projects are working on. Did you know that 70 million tablets were sold this year? By 2015, it is predicted tablet sales will surpass PC sales! A lot of PowerBuilder projects are preparing for this evolution ... Are you?

Data Connection and Usage, the Life Blood of Mobility

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 13:00:00 EDT

Now that Mobility is part of our lives, we are all hooked on our Smartphone or Tablet device and take them everywhere we go, but we need to be aware of something that we almost take for granted… Data Connection & Usage! Especially if we are going abroad and hit the tricky subject of Data Roaming, which can become a very expensive situation personally and corporately. Mobile devices give us access to fantastic content that can be delivered and displayed to our Converged Mobile Devices (CMD's). In the past the Cellular Providers made their money on calls and SMS, but for a while now their new cash cow is data and we are hooked!

User Group Malaise?

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 09:00:00 EDT

Read an interesting article about the .NET Developer Association user group in Redmond, Washington. You would think that the user group in Microsoft’s backyard (the meetings are held at Microsoft’s offices) wouldn’t have any problems lining up guest speakers and drawing a crowd. Well, it looks like they do because they’ve had to cancel several recent meetings and have proposed taking a six-month break to try to determine how to revitalize the group.[1] It had me wondering why such a group would have difficulty holding meetings. Of course, the issue may be specific to that particular group. I don’t know enough about the group to judge that. However, assuming that is not the case, the most likely causes would either be (a) a malaise setting in for .NET groups in particular or (b) a lack of interest in software developer tool user group meetings in general. It wouldn’t seem to be an issue with the demand for .NET developers. According to data from indeed.com, it doesn’t look like the demand for them (at least of the C# variety) is diminishing.[2]

Appeon Version 6.5.1 Released!

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 23:22:00 EDT

New Supported PowerBuilder Features Support the encoding argument for DataWindow SaveAs function and File functions. Support CSV file type for ImportFile function. Support more Section 508 properties: AccessibleName, AccessibleDescription, & AccessibleRole properties of PB controls Inet object supports https address (this feature is available in Appeon only, not in PB)

Tablets Have Come of Age

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:30:00 EDT

This week I attended a Mobile Monday event sponsored by Barnes & Nobile (B & N) which discussed Tablet Computing and promoted their Nook Developer program. The Chair for the meeting was Marek Pawlowski, Founder and Organiser MEX @marekpawlowski and the Panel consisted of Claudio Romanini - Director, Developer Relations, Barnes & Noble (B&N), Stuart Dredge - Freelance Journalist @stuartdredge, Hesham Al-Jehani - Product Manager, Mobile , Comscore and Ben Scott Robinson- creative director, We Love Mobile @bscr. This article is a combination of notes from the meeting and my thoughts.

Why Your Wireless Expert Could Be Your Mobility Team MVP

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 11:00:00 EDT

It may be an unusual angle, but your Enterprise IP Wireless Expert may be your best ally around when it comes to implementing your Mobile Device Security Strategies. The reason why I think this is that all of smartphone and tablet devices support wireless connectivity, and most data plans provide incentives for users to access the web via IP connectivity rather than the carrier’s network. Hopefully this makes sense as it reduces airtime charges for users, often with little or no trade-off in performance and flexibility and relieves congestion in the carrier voice network. So it's a Win-Win situaton, right? Well... what users (and some mobility professionals) might overlook, however, is that a lot of the networks over which Enterprise Mobile Devices might connect to the web are completely unsecured, and that could be very dangerous.

A Snap-In App Framework Using Dynamic PowerBuilder Assemblies (Part 2)

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:45:00 EDT

This two-part series examines and contrasts PowerBuilder .NET 12.5.1’s new dynamic assembly feature with corresponding dynamic library functionality in PowerBuilder Classic. The discourse is presented in the context of a simplified yet practical use case. Part 1 presented the use case, reviewed pertinent PowerBuilder Classic dynamic APIs and presented a Classic PBD implementation. Part 2 introduces PowerBuilder .NET 12.5.1’s Dynamic Assembly feature, reveals relevant PowerBuilder .NET generated assembly internals, and presents a PowerBuilder .NET use case implementation. Along the way it explores PowerBuilder assembly internals. My initial attack plan when exploring version 12.5.1’s dynamic assembly function capabilities was to envision a use case where library functions are used to reflect on an assembly to discover its contents and then extract and instantiate class definitions. I am so used to writing dynamic Classic PowerScript code using Library functions to get lists of objects in a PBD and dynamically creating them that I naively assumed that the .NET Library methods were equivalent to their Classic counterparts. Wrong! As you’ll soon see, my journey took me spelunking deep into the cavities of PowerBuilder .NET assemblies. Lucky for me I got the treasure at the bottom of the cave and was able find my way back out. Read on!

SAP Executive Interview with Raj Nathan

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:15:00 EDT

At Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona, I had the great fortune to interview...Raj Nathan, EVP and CMO, Sybase, an SAP company. As Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Worldwide Marketing and Business Solutions Operations, Dr. Raj Nathan is responsible for all marketing initiatives for Sybase and its subsidiaries, Sybase iAnywhere and Sybase 365. In this role, Dr. Nathan leads a global marketing organization setting Sybase's technology direction and go-to-market initiatives. Under his leadership, Sybase continues to be recognized for visionary technology that meets the direct needs of customers and partners. Dr. Nathan’s work experience has taken him around the globe, and has run the gamut from hardware to software, and from large companies to small including Unisys and Siemens Pyramid. Raj earned his doctorate and master’s degree from Iowa State University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Madras, in India.

The Importance of Future Proofing Mobility

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:00:00 EDT

I have talked a lot about the need to Mobilize Existing Business Systems and Processes in an innovative and strategic way and at the heart of this for Mobile App development is the Mobile Enterprise Application Platform or MEAP. This is important because mobile technology is evolving so rapidly. Companies need to be in position to take advantages of new innovations as they come to market. The world is increasingly unforgiving of those who fail to keep up, as I have said before... Don't be left in the Starting Blocks! There is a lot of competitive advantage in Mobility and you need to invest in your vision to reap the reward! You need to also build a Business Mobility Infrastructure that is capable of accommodating new mobile technologies. You might say, but with all the advances that we’ve seen in the past couple of years, with so many new models of smartphones, and now tablets, what more can there really be? How many ways can device manufactures package a Converged Mobile Device (CMD - I'm bundling both smartphone and tablets here)? You're probably asking...Isn’t all this mobility frenzy going to settle down?

Rapid Deployment Solutions for Mobile

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EST

At Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona, I had the great fortune to interview... Hari Subramanyam, Global Rollout Manager, RDS Mobile Solutions Assembly & Packaging, SAP. In this interview I find out... What SAP offers for customers to get started with mobile solutions. What is currently available today. What rapid deployment solutions are being planned for the future

Appeon Mobile: First-Ever Mobility Solution for the PowerBuilder Community

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 05:30:00 EST

Novalys SAS announced on March 7, 2012 that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Appeon Corporation to distribute the first-ever mobility solution for the PowerBuilder community. Leveraging Appeon’s over a decade of experience in PowerBuilder web deployment and its core technology platform, Appeon is developing a mobile deployment solution for PowerBuilder – Appeon Mobile. Appeon Mobile will offer the simplest, fastest, and lowest-cost mobile development option for the PowerBuilder developer community. Under the agreement, Novalys will market, sell, and support Appeon Mobile worldwide.

Novalys and Appeon Partner to Distribute Appeon Mobile Worldwide

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST

Novalys SAS announced on Wednesday it has entered into a strategic partnership with Appeon Corporation to distribute the first-ever mobility solution for the Sybase PowerBuilder community. Leveraging Appeon’s decade of experience in PowerBuilder deployment and its core technology platform, Appeon will develop a mobile deployment solution for PowerBuilder – Appeon Mobile. Appeon Mobile will offer the simplest, fastest, and lowest-cost mobile development option for the PowerBuilder developer community. Under the agreement, Novalys will market, sell, and support Appeon Mobile worldwide. In response to growing demand from the PowerBuilder community for mobility, Appeon Mobile will enable developers to rapidly build mobile applications exclusively with the Sybase PowerBuilder and using only existing programming skills. This empowers developers to leverage existing investments in PowerBuilder and the unbeatable productivity that PowerBuilder offers. For example, line-of-business mobile applications can be built in just weeks instead of months. Moreover, it will no longer be necessary to use different tools, programming skills, and build multiple projects for each platform, such as Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android.

SAP and Samsung Partnership

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:55:16 EST

At Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona, I had the great fortune to interview Oliver Bussmann, CIO at SAP and BC Cho, Head of Global Enterprise Business Team, Mobile Communications - Samsung Electronics. In this interview I find out... What Oliver Bussmann thought the main trends were at this years MWC? What was the news about Samsung and SAP?

Take PB to the Web, Mobile & More!

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 07:30:00 EST

Your client/server applications work well, and you have invested a lot in them but you need to keep up with the times and move your applications to the Web. So you may wonder “What should we do? Do we really need to junk our existing applications? Retrain our developers? Hire new guys who know nothing about our business?”

Building a Snap-In App Framework Using Dynamic PowerBuilder Assemblies

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:57:00 EST

The articles in this two-part series examine and contrast PowerBuilder .NET 12.5.1’s new dynamic assembly feature with corresponding dynamic library functionality in PowerBuilder Classic. The discourse is presented in the context of a simplified yet practical use case. The first article presents the use case, reviews pertinent PowerBuilder Classic dynamic APIs, and presents a Classic PBD implementation. The second article introduces PowerBuilder .NET 12.5.1’s Dynamic Assembly feature, reveals relevant PowerBuilder .NET generated assembly internals, and presents a PowerBuilder .NET use case implementation. Say you were on a programming team designing a PowerBuilder .NET WPF based system that included this requirement.

Breaking Platform Limitations

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:00:00 EST

One of the innovative new features in the PowerBuilder 12.5.1 release is its ability to deploy PowerBuilder .NET code to run in 64-bit mode on 64-bit Windows platforms. In this article, after gaining background and perspective on 32- and 64-bit memory management and .NET deployment models, you’ll explore the internals, strengths and limitations of this new feature. Almost all current server, desktop and notebook hardware platforms have 64-bit processors. Almost all current versions of Windows operating systems support both 32- and 64-bit platforms. With the 12.5.1 release, some PowerBuilder application software will be able to take full advantage of all available system memory. Read on to see if your code is a candidate for instant memory expansion. 32-bit OS’ can access a theoretical maximum 4 GB of RAM. In practice however, 32-bit Windows employs a 4-GB tuning model in which an application gets only 2 GB of virtual memory while the remaining 2 GB are assigned to the OS kernel. So the realistic maximum application memory is limited to 2GB. This limitation can only be released if the application was compiled with the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE option and the /3GB switch is set. In this situation, the application can get up to 3 GB of memory. (See PowerBuilder documentation on how to make the compiler large memory aware if you run out of memory when compiling your application.) PowerBuilder applications, not being large address aware, are therefore limited to 2GB RAM.

PowerBuilder News

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 EST

Sybase announced that its Enterprise Application Server (EAServer) achieved record-breaking price-performance results, beating Oracle and all other application servers on a dual-node configuration in the independent SPECjAppServer benchmark. EAServer was demonstrated to be significantly faster and more cost-effective than Oracle and other vendors, with greater performance and a lower price per standard unit of work.

Debugger Beta for Oracle in QweryBuilder

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 09:05:00 EST

We finally finished implementing a debugger for Oracle in QweryBuilder. It was setup to work very similar to how the debuggers for Sybase ASE and SQL Anywhere work. In order to make sure we didn't miss anything important, we need people to beta test it for us. If you're interested in trying it out, you can download 7.3.0 Beta http://www.werysoft.com/downloader.aspx?file=Werysoft Inc.http://www.blogger.com/profile/04726066291902301395noreply@blogger.com0

Sybase 365 Next Generation Mobile Commerce Platform

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:00:00 EST

Sybase 365, a subsidiary of Sybase, Inc., announced on Tuesday the release of its next generation Mobile Commerce platform, making it the most complete mobile commerce offering on the market for mobile banking, mobile payments and mobile money services for both developed and emerging markets. The next generation platform enhances the customer engagement experience that financial institutions and mobile operators can offer their end-users, by providing a complete set of rich features for mobile banking, mobile payments and mobile money services – on a single platform. For financial institutions, the Sybase® mobile commerce platform enables banks to extend their relationship to both the retail and business customer through the mobile channel, and to create new services and improve customer loyalty. The rich set of mobile payment functionality supports mobile payments services that enable consumers to use their mobile devices to pay for real-world goods and services. This latest release adds mobile money capability to the platform for branchless banking, enabling financial institutions and operators to run financial inclusion services for the unbanked and under banked, turning the consumers mobile into a branch-in-their-pocket.

PFC Project Partitioning Using a Referenced PowerBuilder Assembly Target

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:30:00 EST

Paul Harvey, the great American radio personality, would always conclude his colorful broadcasts with the quip “And now you know the rest of the story.” For those of you not acquainted with Paul’s broadcasts, here’s a sample. If you get to about 3:40 in, you’ll hear the classic remark. Paraphrasing Paul’s tag line, in this article you’ll learn “the rest of the story” about RAD Development methodology in PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET using a Referenced PB Assembly Target. I’ll explain the technique and implementation steps using the open source PEAT PFC demo application. In a previous PBDJ article, “Slicing the Pie with PowerBuilder .NET 12.1 EBF Project Partitioning” (http://yakovwerde.ulitzer.com/node/1740373), I wrote about achieving Classic RAD-like build/test speeds in .NET WPF applications by configuring the Project object partitioning feature. This feature lets you logically carve up a large application into a small manageable-sized executable with a set of related PowerBuilder assemblies that are automatically generated at full build-time via the Project Object. Although, once configured, you can benefit from RAD speed incremental compiles when making changes to your non-framework code, this approach has several disadvantages. First, it can take a lot of developer time, knowledge of the application and several trial and error attempts to configure the feature. Second, since both the framework and the concrete application are in the same target, an inadvertent save to a framework object will cause a full build on the entire application to occur. Third, a flaw in the incremental compile process causes a bunch of meaningless compiler errors to be reported when changing code in a visual object. The only way to clear the situation is by doing a full build (thereby giving up all compile time advantages).

Mobility in Business Is Now a Necessity!

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST

If you have been reading my articles and blogs you will know that I am a staunch believer that the iPad is the Corporate Mobility game changer and enabler for the future and the Future of Mobility is NOW! I totally believe that the Mobile device is a tool for the future worker that can be unlocked with the forward thinking and design of bespoke business apps. Having a Mobile Device and never building Corporate Apps is like having a Swiss Army Knife on a Survival Trip and never using it.

Advanced DataWindow Sorting

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:00:00 EST

This article provides a means of automating the sorting of DataWindows... not just grid DataWindows as discussed in last month’s article, but all DataWindows, regardless of display format. Bear in mind that we are writing programmer tools. When writing for programmers we want to give the programmer the maximum number of options while minimizing the programmer effort. In other words, default as much as possible but allow the programmer to move beyond the defaults. It would be nice to be able to save searches and reload them but we will save that for the next article.

PowerBuilder News

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 EST

Sybase and AvantGo, a leading provider of mobile enterprise software, announced that they have signed a definitive agreement for Sybase to acquire AvantGo in a cash merger valued at approximately $38 million.

Looking into Enterprise iOS

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

Enterprise Mobility has a lot of benefits, such as improving the efficiency of a company's business processes and their Information Workers alike. If the term Information Workers is new to you, then a brief explanation is that they are traditional employees using corporate data in their day to day tasks, historically they were chained to the desktop. Now they are free and can become mobile. This mobile enablement gives a competitive edge to a company and a leading position, using such a forward thinking initiative. I travel into the City of London every day and have noticed more and more over the last few years the iPhone becoming visibly the 'weapon of choice' of the city worker, rather than having two devices, one the corporate Blackberry and the other the personal iPhone. A lot of companies are allowing their worker to bring their personally owned iPhones into a corporate plan, where the data and voice charges are taken care of by the company after the employee agrees to a usage policy (BYOD). Also I am seeing the chose your own device (CYOD) policy being lead by the Prosumers in the company choosing iOS. In the last half of 2010 I noticed a trend emerging of corporate iPad use, culminating one evening in my train carriage of four commuters within meters of each other, using email, games, Numbers and Pages on their iPads. Since then this has increased massively and become the majority in 2011 and it's my opinion that it will continue in 2012!

Perhaps You Can Teach an Old Dog a New Trick Or Two…

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:45:00 EST

Struggling to get familiar with the new PowerBuilder.NET IDE and the technology it allows you to use (e.g., WPF, REST, WCF and the rest of the alphabet soup)? Then you should run, not walk, over to the free eTutorial series that Sybase just made available for PowerBuilder 12.5: http://www.sybase.com/powerbuilder125eTutorial The training was put together by Yakov Werde. Yakov, for those who may not have heard of him, is the managing partner of eLearnIT LLC. Prior to that he spent more than 10 years as a trainer for Sybase, teaching classes on PowerBuilder, Java and .NET. And before that he was a software developer like you and me using PowerBuilder. So he knows of what he speaks. (Yakov is also a regular author for PowerBuilder Developer’s Journal and the ISUG Technical Journal, a member of TeamSybase and a PowerBuilder MVP.)

Creation and Consumption of Web Services with PowerBuilder

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST

PowerBuilder 12.5 introduced a number of significant enhancements to web services support, both for creation and consumption. We’re going to look at what those new features provide and how to use them. We’re also going to look at how we can package some of that functionality so that it can be used from PowerBuilder Classic applications as well. First though, some background. When support for a web service client was first introduced in PowerBuilder 9, it was done based on an open source library called EasySOAP. There were some limitations with that implementation, primarily because the EasySOAP library only supported SOAP 1.1, was limited to XML over HTTP transport, and provided no support for ancillary web services standards such as WS-Security.

PowerBuilderTV Celebrates Two Years of Webinars

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:08:00 EST

With a varied range of subjects from Taking PowerBuilder to the Cloud, to Adding Single Sign-On to PowerBuilder Applications, we have been working to keep the community up-to-date on PowerBuilder tips and tools. As our two year anniversary approaches, we’d like to share with you a little insight into how things are going so far. We’ve had great contributions from the PowerBuilder community including some prominent community members such as Dave Fish and John Strano, among many others, and so it’s no surprise that PBTV has had more than 5 000 registrations in 2011. Over the past two years, PBTV has worked to make information on PowerBuilder more accessible to a growing and increasingly diverse audience, with broadcasts in three different languages: English, Spanish and French.

Drop-Down Lists for Decimal Fields

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:30:00 EST

PowerBuilder has a very handy way to make data entry more convenient: the DropDownDataWindow and DropDownListBox edit styles for DataWindow columns. Indeed, it’s much simpler to pick up a value from a look-up list than to type it in each time you need to enter it. However, it looks like we’ve overlooked one of the cases when use of a drop-down list can make data entry easier for the user. Most of the time we use drop-down lists when working with lists of pairs “encoded value”/”decoded value”: the users see and select decoded values and encoded values are saved in the database. The data type of the columns for which we use drop-down lists in such cases may be either string or integer, but it doesn’t make any difference in terms of defining the edit style. Another instance when drop-down lists come in handy is when there is a predefined list of all possible values that can be entered into a column; in this case the entered values shouldn’t even necessarily be encoded and may be stored in the database as is. In this article I will show you how drop-down lists can be used for an altogether different purpose – the entry of special values, and what you should take into consideration when using drop-down lists for DataWindow decimal columns.

DataWindow Sorting with Column Headers

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:30:00 EST

This article describes how to create a grid presentation window that allows sorting by clicking on the column header. To begin we need to create a grid DataWindow. I’m selecting just few columns from the employee table. Here is my sql for the DataWindow in Figure 1. Once we have created it I get the DataWindow painter shown in Figure 2. There are several changes that we need to make. Let’s change the status column so it’s no longer a set of radio buttons. This is a read-only screen so let’s remove the status and add a computed field. To do this let’s remove the Status column altogether. Then add a computed field in its place.

How Quickly the Mighty Have Fallen

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:30:00 EST

On November 9, Adobe announced in a blog post[1] that it had decided to cease efforts to develop browser plugins for mobile devices to play Flash, indicating that HTML5 was “the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” In case that sounds like Adobe abandoned Flash entirely, it should be noted that Adobe indicated their intentions to continue to develop the AIR player for mobile devices, so that the role for Flash on mobile devices would be restricted to native apps, just not browser-based apps. A few days later in another blog post[2], Adobe also noted that it was releasing the entire Flex SDK (used by the Flash Builder IDE to generate Flash RIA applications) to open source, indicating that “In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for enterprise application development.”

PowerBuilder News

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 EST

11/26/02 - Sybase announced a new set of free online resources designed to help companies achieve 'Information Liquidity,' or the efficient transformation of enterprise data into economic value. The Web site is in partnership with and available on Forbes.com and features an interactive Information Liquidity Assessment test that provides an evaluation and next steps to improve the speed, flow, and quality of data within an enterprise.

The Mobile Business Object... Your Mobile Way Forward

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:15:00 EST

As you probably know the Mobile Business Object (MBO) is at the heart of Sybase's UnWired Platform, which is a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform used in turn as part of the SAP Mobility Platform. Once defined the MBO can be used in Native (such as iOS) as well as Hybrid Web Container Applications. It can be described in four points. Defines the data you want to use from your backend system and exposes it to be used for your mobile application /workflow. Created using our simple, graphical tooling inside the Eclipse development environment. Re-usable, allowing you to leverage across multiple device types. Future proofing of your application, when new device types are added your same MBO can be used.

After PowerBuilder 12.5 Classic – Sneak Preview

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:00:00 EST

By the time you are reading this, PB12.5 will have been released and work on PB15 well under way. A lot of exciting things have gone into the .NET version of PB but we still get requests for features to go into the Classic version of the product. Even though there was a lull in activity in PB12 Classic, we are back again in 12.5 – and we are not stopping. You will probably have seen Dave Fish’s webcasts on plans for PB15 (his disclaimers apply here as well) and are hungry for details – I hope to address that in this article. PB has been around a long time and has accumulated many quirks and inconsistencies. We also have feature requests that are almost as old as the product itself. Our recent releases have done a lot to address these issues, but there are still many features that either need to be updated or simply completed. It would be amazing if you can still get away with a new application today that used “traditional” MDI. I’ll let you in on a secret – the toolbar in the IDE has the same implementation as the one in your application at runtime – the difference is that the one in the IDE has comboboxes. And there is no reason why only WPF should have the grid layout.

Silverlight Is Dead, Long Live Silverlight

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:00:00 EST

There’s been a lot of discussion since Microsoft’s BUILD conference on the fate of Silverlight. (Something that is an issue for us because Sybase was originally looking at supporting it for web app development in PowerBuilder 15.) Contrary to what a number of the pundits and would-be pundits have said, I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say that Silverlight is dead in Windows 8. I think it’s more accurate to say it’s evolved. As background for those who haven’t been following this closely, Microsoft announced that the Windows 8 operating system would support two kinds of applications: traditional “desktop apps” and the newer “metro style apps.” What would not be available in the Internet Explorer provided with Windows 8 would be support for any plugins, either Silverlight or Flash (see Figure 1).

Advanced DataWindow Filtering with PowerFilter

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:00:00 EST

As we all know, the DataWindow is a very powerful and flexible control used for data presentation and manipulation. For the most part, the features that you get out of the box allow you to create some very impressive applications. With that said, there is always room for improvement. Fortunately for us, the DataWindow was built with flexibility in mind. By taking advantage of this flexibility, we can extend the DataWindow to do almost anything we want. In this article, I’m going to introduce you to PowerFilter, a control developed by Jim Reese and available for purchase from www.PowerToTheBuilder.com. PowerFilter is an easy-to-implement DataWindow filtering component that gives your application auto-filtering functionality similar to that found in Excel 2007\2010. It works with your existing DataWindows and requires as little as three lines of PowerScript to implement (see Figure 1).

Writing to the Console in PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Yesterday I taught an intro to PowerBuilder .NET 12.5 session. Part of the presentation had me comparing the.NET IL code inside an assemblies generated from code written in C# and PowerBuilder. The C# code, after performing a simple arithmetic calculation echoed results to the console using these two lines of code. In PowerScript, ordinarily, I echo results using a Messagebox call, but yesterday, I thought I’d “step out on the limb” and echo output to the console using the same NET Framework class methods C# programmers use.

Great Content at the Sybase and SAP Nordic Roadshow 2011

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:24:00 EDT

Last Month the Sybase SAP Nordic Roadshow again hit 4 countries in 4 days... Stockholm Sweden, Helsinki Finland, Oslo Norway and Copenhagen Denmark. A serious amount of traveling, delivering a serious amount of content, within the 3 tracks Manage, Analyze and Mobilize. A number of the key speakers, including myself had presented at Sybase TechWave, which was co-located with SAP TechEd in Las Vegas the week before... Raj Rathee and Javier Cuerva had Manage, Dan Lahl had Analyze and I had Mobilize.

PowerBuilder News

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:00:00 EDT

9/10 - Sybase announced the general availability of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) on the Apple 'Jaguar' Server. With ASE, system implementers will be able to deploy high-performance, scalable, database-driven applications on the Mac platform. Sybase also announced the availability of a free Developer's Edition of ASE, designed to enable developers to build and test ASE solutions.

Sybase Celebrates 20-Year PowerBuilder Milestone

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 08:45:00 EDT

Sybase, Inc., on Monday announced the availability of Sybase PowerBuilder 12.5, the second .NET release of Sybase's award-winning rapid application development tool. PowerBuilder 12.5 empowers developers with the easiest, fastest and most cost-effective solution for creating modern and visually appealing business applications on the Microsoft Windows 32 ((Win32)and .NET Frameworks. Today's announcement was made at Sybase TechWave, collocated with SAP TechEd 2011 and being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, from September 12-16. "Sybase PowerBuilder has remained throughout the years a bastion of application development productivity for a wide class of enterprise applications that combine heavy database orientation with a highly productive graphical user interface (GUI)," said Al Hilwa, program director for IDC's Application Development Software research. "The direction that PowerBuilder has taken to become a seamless Windows .NET environment with the Visual Studio shell incorporated into its infrastructure has meant that the product can now be considered equally for evolving existing systems and for developing new ones for traditional Windows 32 environments and for .NET."

Join the Wolf Pack in Vegas Baby!

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 20:00:00 EDT

Sybase TechWave is back in Vegas Baby!.. The glowing light in the hot Mojave Desert, Las Vegas, is this week the location for the hottest & brightest technologies in the IT industry… presented by Sybase & SAP. For me I have been involved in the preparation and planning of the Mobility Track which is key to Sybase's 'Enterprise UnWired' vision, but there are more... TechWave features four conference tracks: Data Management, Application Development Tools, Analytics, and Enterprise Mobility. Products covered include Sybase ASE, Replication Server, SQL Anywhere, Sybase Control Center, Sybase IQ, PowerBuilder, PowerDesigner, Sybase RAP, Sybase ESP, Afaria, and Sybase Unwired Platform. Some products may be represented in multiple tracks. Each track will open with a Plenary Session on Tuesday morning, immediately following the SAP TechEd General Session. These special sessions provide a high-level overview of the products and topics that will be covered in the breakout sessions.