I went to Vienna for the Sybase Development Tools Boot Camp in November, my first trip to Europe. Haven't seen much yet, except the duty free sections of the airports, after my 10-hour flight from Johannesburg, and a nice three-hour stopover at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. Then the two-hour trip to Vienna, and a half-hour taxi ride to the hotel here in Vienna.

When I arrived here at the Trend Albatros, it just started to snow. Now, to all you Europeans, that possibly doesn't mean much, but the last time I saw snow was in 1982. (It doesn't snow much in South Africa.) Back then, I was 4 years old, and I can't really say that I really understood what the fuss was about. (But Dad, I see snow every day on TV....)

I work for Sybase South Africa in Johannesburg. I used to run Professional Services for our division, but decided that I would like to take on the responsibility of managing the Sybase development toolset from a presales perspective.

This boot camp probably came at a very good time. I have extensive practical experience with most of the products that I manage and understand most of them pretty well, but Sybase has been busy and there are some exciting new things that need some attention. I not only manage the development tools, I also (for now, anyway) have the same responsibility for the data services tools.

Day 2: Boot Camp
Day 2 started with breakfast - can't really say it was the best breakfast that I've had, but it hit the spot anyway. Didn't really have dinner last night as I was a bit tired after the flight.

I've just arrived back at the hotel after a pretty full day. We had dinner in a Spanish restaurant tonight, and the food was pretty good. Was looking forward to some real Austrian-type restaurant, but someone mentioned that there is some tie between Austria and the Spanish.

Anyway, today we covered Vladimir Maruna's section on a methodology he calls BestPractice, Xiau Wang covered the new PowerDesigner features, and Hugo Pedro from Sybase Portugal covered some interesting applications of the PowerDesigner tool.

Vladimer's session was probably the best of the day. Back in South Africa, our training division picked up on a need for an industry standard business analysis course, and packaged it for the developer and business analysis. BestPractice gives PowerDesigner fans what they have needed for a while now: a simple methodology to model complex business requirements, specifications, processes, and domains. I've had the displeasure of having to try and implement RUP before, and this really seems tons easier.

Xiau was up next and launched into a presentation and demo of the new PowerDesigner features. There are so many useful new features, and I would have to study these presentations in greater detail to remember all of them. The most significant ones were Hibernate and JSF capabilities from within PowerDesigner (and subsequently Workspace). I plan on asking him what the plan is for Struts and other architectural design patterns. The JSF demo was pretty impressive, and it definitely seems usable and very practical, so I'll reserve judgement for now. The Hibernate stuff is very cool; I'd like to see them add Torque to the mix.

Another excellent feature was the mapping editor. With this you could do O/R mapping, XML/R mapping, etc., in a more useful way than currently possible. There are plans to extend this functionality to do more complex ETL type modeling but, for now, only a simplistic ETL design is available. By the end of next year, I believe PD should be ready to integrate with ETL tools.

To me, these were the most important things to mention. There are some enhancements to reverse-engineering, forward-engineering, reporting, and they're all pretty good, and I think that existing users will be pretty happy with version 12.

Hugo Pedro's presentation had a bit of a different spin to it. Recently, I've been surprised with the amount of internal metadata projects that are on the go in the South African market. Most big companies are required to have a business view of the enterprise and are spending huge amounts of cash to get to some form of a solution. According to one of our larger customers, no vendor has a full solution for this problem. My feeling is that something like Avaki fits perfectly here, but let's put that aside for now.

Hugo and his team have developed a Web-based solution that sits on top of the PowerDesigner repository. For now, it's read-only access, but it won't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to apply metadata to this, or in fact change the model by changing the repository. I can definitely think of at least four large companies that will want this app as is, and one that will use it as part of their metadata project.

Then, Hugo demonstrated how you can modify the Business Process Modeling side of PD to extend SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) into the BPM side. It's a pretty good solution, but might need a bit more than this. I have the demo and models available, so if anyone wants to see them, drop me a comment.

All in all, a good day, but too much death by PowerPoint. Hopefully, day two will be more interactive. Still, I received some pretty good direction, and met some people worth knowing... Ian Thain is up tomorrow, and will cover the PowerBuilder-type products, such as DW.NET, EAServer, PocketBuilder, and PowerBuilder.

Day 3: Boot Camp
Finally, the end of day three. It's about two in the morning, and I'm still working away. I had to work on a customer proposal after a full day's training, discussion, and getting my head around a bunch of products. Needless to say, I've decided to call it a night now and wrap up my thoughts of the day.

Ian Thain presented all of the PowerBuilder-type tools this morning, covering PowerBuilder, PocketBuilder, and DataWindow.NET. I got my hands on a copy of PB 11, which is not in Beta yet. This version contains the much-awaited .NET CLR compiler, which will allow PB to run as managed code under .NET 2. Apparently, PowerBuilder sales were up 15% this quarter, and some questions were asked as to why, but no clear answer was given.

PocketBuilder and DataWindow.NET could have something to do with this, but you would have to go to that 15% and find out why they decided to purchase. Sybase is showing some good commitment to this product line, and with PB 12 already being worked on, this tool will not be going away; I'm looking forward to it's reinvention as a smart client tool, as opposed to client/server.

By the way, have a look at this site if you're one of the guys who believe PowerBuilder is dead. The PowerBuilder DataWindow is still the best data display and modification component around. Full stop. Nothing beats this technology, it's been around for ages, and is getting better by the release.

Ian did his Pocketbuilder futures presentation that he presents so well, and also did at the ISUG roadshow in Africa. This is one of the most interesting tools in the set, purely because everything that is brilliant about PowerBuilder is in it, and a lot more. Wish we could do more with marketing this product, but I guess that's my job now, for SA and Africa anyway....

Then, we started with the Workspace program for the day. Xiau started with how to use PowerDesigner in Workspace as an MDA and MDD tool for creating service applications. This was brilliant, and proves why PD is rated so highly. For the developers who understand what Web services is at a high level, but aren't exactly sure how to get it done, have a look at this tool. It abstracts the difficulty from the analyst/architect/developer and is able to model and generate all of the code needed to implement SOA. Really awesome stuff.

Something that I forgot to mention earlier was the PD enhancements to the information liquidity model. You can now model replication into IQ with PowerDesigner, building staging tables for an ASE database should you need to use RepServer to get data into IQ. Drop me an e-mail or a comment should you want more info; this really works great, and lots of our customers will want to see this.

Then we went through a lab session on Workspace. First we covered the database tooling. One of the initial comments was the fact that the database painter (from PowerBuilder) will probably not stay in Workspace for too long. The engineering team needed to have something and the PB stuff was there; however, the idea is to have a pure Java plug-in for this, keeping the options open for running this on Linux (maybe). Obviously, PowerDesigner runs on Windows only, so if you want modeling inside of Workspace, I guess you'll have to keep Windows for your desktop. Servers could be anything though, so it keeps to the trend where people are migrating server platforms, but keeping the rich functionality of Windows on the desktop. I'm a big Linux fan, but I guess you need critical mass for a port like this (PD on Linux).

Anyway, back to database tooling - very slick indeed. It's one of the best stored-procedure development tools I've seen in awhile. DBArtisan is very good, but this (from a stored proc and trigger development perspective, not administration) is great. Code complete, debugging, syntax help are all built in. Unfortunately, there is only Sybase support for now, but Sybase is helping Eclipse to build the DTP (database tooling project) that will allow other vendors to extend on this functionality. Wouldn't help Sybase if they did development for all the other vendors now, would it?