When Bruce Armstrong contacted me about writing a PowerBuilder Beginner's column I agreed almost immediately. The reason for this is that there are many existing PowerBuilder applications in production and their original developers have moved to other positions or left the companies that wrote them.

Developers who may not be familiar with PowerBuilder must support these applications. They are entitled to articles to assist them just as we had back in the early days of PowerBuilder. Personally I've been using PowerBuilder since version 2 and continue to use it today.

My consulting business has allowed me to work with numerous companies over the past 10 years. These companies were different sizes, different industries, and had different development skills. This has provided and continues to provide a tremendous opportunity to learn what technologies companies are using, their development skill level, and what technology needs they have. What I've learned from visiting them is that not all companies use the latest technologies. Some companies aren't ready to move to the Web and others only need client/server applications. This is why one of my best-selling Computer-Based Training courses is PowerBuilder 9, which is a basic course. Not everyone uses the latest technologies.

So what does one do to get started with PowerBuilder? PowerBuilder is a tool with an incredible number of features and a lot of functionality and it's difficult to know where to begin. It's the best client/server development tool and has been for years. Sybase has also been adding more Web and distributed features so that you as a developer can work with one tool for all your development needs. This monthly series of articles will build two applications: a client/server and a Web application. This will take you - our readers - through the many processes in building applications.

This month's article will cover the PowerBuilder workspace and what kinds of targets are supported. The workspace defines an area of work and the different applications that are part of that workspace. It's very flexible in that you can create a different workspace for each application you have or one workspace for multiple applications. My personal preference is to use a single workspace. Why? The reason is that I want fast access to different objects in different applications so I can review code from one application that might be helpful in another. Also my preference is to work on client/server or Web applications in the same workspace. Since I'm a consultant I have a workspace for each of my clients. A single workspace contains all the targets that I maintain for that client. I have some clients whose workspace contains one target and others that have 25 targets. Figure 1 is a screen shot of one of my customer's workspaces and as you can see it contains numerous targets, both client/server and Web apps.

The workspace is divided into four sections, and each developer can customize the layout. The first section is the System Tree. This section shows the workspace name and all the targets in the workspace. This is where you drill down to review objects, edit objects, and regenerate. The second section is the Clip section, which is where you can store bits of code that can be pasted into your code. In the first article Steve talked about the importance of consistency and standards. The Clip section can help with consistent coding styles. The third section is the Output section. This section displays output from the regeneration of objects, errors when saving, or compilation messages. The final section is the rest of the workspace, which is where objects are edited. In Figure 1 this is on the right side of the screen.

Each section of the workspace can be displayed if desired and sized. Click on the Window dropdown menu and select System Tree, Output, or Clip to show or hide each section. If the section is currently displayed a check is displayed next to it. You can size or move the sections to customize the workspace.

There are some settings for the workspace that you should be aware of. They are accessed by choosing the Tools dropdown menu and then System Options. Click on the Workspaces tab to view the settings as shown in Figure 2. There only a few settings but they do make development easier. One thing I'll discuss is the number of recent objects, workspaces, and connections. These default to 8, 8, and 5 respectively and this is something I don't understand. I always change the numbers to the maximum supported. Why wouldn't you want to be able to pull up the maximum number of objects or workspaces? Targets define each application and indicate the type of application, and any specific settings for the application. PowerBuilder supports several types of applications like client/server, Web, EAServer components, and COM components.

Now that we've reviewed workspaces and targets it's time to get started creating our applications. The purpose of these articles is not to be a step-by-step tutorial but to discuss best practices based on our years of experience with PowerBuilder. We'll create a workspace named PBDJ10 that contains two targets. The first target will be a PowerBuilder application (client/server) named pbdj_CS. The second will be a JSP target called pbdj_Web. You might wonder why we're creating two targets. Simple. We plan on building two applications that have the same functionality: one a client/server application and the other a Web application. This approach will demonstrate how PowerBuilder can be used for both.

If you're new to PowerBuilder for Web development, I'll give you a tip to save a little time and aggravation when creating the JSP target. When defining a JSP target you must define and select the JSP server where the application will be deployed. Since we'll be deploying to EAServer (Sybase's Transaction Server) you'll need to install EAServer on your computer and define an EAServer profile. If you don't do this you'll have to stop in the middle of creating the target and start over. Once you've created the EAServer profile, go ahead and create a JSP target named pbdj_web that will be our Web-based application for the article series.

Now that we've created the workspace and targets our next article will begin to create the applications. You might wonder why I don't start to create objects now. The answer is that showing screens does not indicate progress; progress is indicated by a good design. In the last article Steve addressed standards. Standards are crucial to the success and longevity of any project and shouldn't be ignored.

Please pass along any comments and suggestions on topics of interest for this column. Just like standards are critical to the success of a project, comments and suggestions will ensure the articles are a success as well.