Java is great and all, it's damn sexy, and it's elegant. However, I don't see how it's more practical to code, from the ground up, a complex and large scale system. Of course this is all relative to how simple I am finding doing bug fixes, code maintenance, and development of extension of existing functionality in PowerBuilder 9.0.

Who Will Become the PowerBuilder of the Web 2.0 Set?
by Judith Hurwitz
from http://jshurwitz.wordpress.com

Recently I have been having dejá vu back to the days of Powersoft. If you are old enough to remember, Powersoft was the leader in making graphical development practical for the masses - rather than the object-oriented gurus. Back in the early 1990s when Powersoft's product - called PowerBuilder - was in its heyday, it had been able to achieve dominance over arch-rival Gupta Technology and a myriad of other long-forgotten competitors. Ironically, at the time, Gupta had a much more sophisticated object-oriented environment than PowerBuilder. But PowerBuilder was able to achieve leadership because the company found a way to make the traditional COBOL developer (and there were lots of them) very successful as graphical software designers. The secret was that while PowerBuilder professed to be an object-oriented graphical development environment, it was actually a procedural environment that was familiar to the COBOL developer. Therefore, the skills that had made this generation of developers successful in an earlier generation provided the platform for a new career path in client/server development. Therefore, PowerBuilder took the market by storm and set the path for the early success of client/server computing.

Now, fast forward to today and the advent of Web 2.0 - I am seeing lots of interesting tools such as Nexaweb, JackBe, and Kapow. All these companies have a common strategy: they want to become the PowerBuilder of this new generation of application development environments. To create a rich, collaborative environment requires a level of sophistication that would prohibit less technical developers from participating. Therefore, just as PowerBuilder provided a way for the masses to create a graphical first-generation environment, so this next generation of development tools will bring Web 2.0 to a broad audience. These Web development environments provide the dynamic, stateful approach needed to create Web 2.0 environments.

I think that this movement toward Web 2.0 and these abstracted tools to support them will complete the picture of a service-oriented architecture. The Web 2.0 environments will make the browser environment a full-fledged participant in enterprise computing. Over time, we'll see lots of business people creating compelling business services in this way, focused on innovative, collaborative software that provides a rich client environment that provides sophisticated communications, as well as a stateful distributed computing platform. This is not an easy feat but one that some innovative players are going to grab to become the PowerBuilder of the Web 2.0 set.

More on Winforms and the GUI Controls
By Brad Wery
from www.powertothebuilder.com/blog/

I must admit, I'm having fun using PB11 with C#.

I've found a way to add my own event handling in PB Winforms simply by using a .NET Assembly. Some events are not available to us in the IDE. Some events that we use to use have been "filtered" out and become unsupported. There is a way to execute these events with a couple of function calls.

There were two events in my case that I needed to trap, neither of which were available in the IDE. They were the Paint and MouseLeave event. In the past I would have used the pbm_paint event id for the Paint event and the Other event for the MouseLeave event. PB11 filters these events out so they are no longer options.

To get around this I created a .NET assembly in C#. This new class had one public function and accepted one arguement ("object pbObj"). The function did the following:
namespace PBEvent

{
   public class PBEventHandler
   {
     private object pbObject;

     private void PBTriggerEvent(string eventId)
     {
       Sybase.PowerBuilder.Win.PBUserObject pbUO = (Sybase.PowerBuilder.Win.PBUserObject)pbObject;
       pbUO.TriggerEvent(eventId);
     }

     public void PBRegisterObject(object pbObj)
     {
       pbObject = pbObj;

       pbObj.Paint += delegate { PBTriggerEvent("ue_Paint"); };
       pbObj.MouseLeave += delegate { PBTriggerEvent("ue_MouseLeave"); };
     }

   }
}

And calling it was even simpler:

//Declare instance Variable
#if defined PBDOTNET then
     PBEvent.PBEventHandler i_PBEventHandler
#end if

//Register events - Constructor event
#if defined PBDOTNET then
     i_PBEventHandler = CREATE PBEvent.PBEventHandler

     i_PBEventHandler.PBRegisterObject(THIS)
#end if

Seven Ways to Help New Developers Learn PowerBuilder
by Jason L. Froebe
from http://froebe.net/blog/2007/11/13/new-developers-for-sybases-powerbuilder-11/

There still seems to be a steep learning curve when it comes to Sybase's PowerBuilder. In this specific case, PB11 is no easier.

What *I* personally would like to see is:

1. Step-by-step online tutorials to create a multitude of projects - from simple "hello world" applications to database-connected applications, to .NET to AJAX-enabled .NET Web apps
2. Online videos for the new and experienced developers rather than just feature highlights
3. More books... from the "Beginning PowerBuilder 11" (perhaps a "for Dummies" series type book) to super-advanced PB11
4. More podcasts ( take a look at Meet the Gimp (http://feeds.feedburner.com/meettheg) for a format example)
5. PowerBuilder gallery of open source and commercial PB applications (please don't just point to the abomination known as codeXchange) and online PB communities
6. A better-tiered licensing model: Free version (take a look at Microsoft's VB Express (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express/aa718406.aspx for a model of what should be included for free), Student (K-university) edition, Professional / Small Business, Enterprise. There should be no feature differences between the student and enterprise editions - the only difference should be in what PB can be used for (licensing).
7. Open source and hobby-ist development should be actively promoted to help rebuild the PB community
   Can anyone think of anything else to help new developers learn PowerBuilder?