One of the biggest complaints I hear about PowerBuilder is how the applications developed with it end up looking old and outdated. PowerBuilder allows developers to create complicated, robust, and efficient business applications. What it doesn't do is offer an effective presentation. Sometimes lackluster presentation can hurt an application's marketability. Unfortunate as it is, the look of the application is what gives users their first impression. An old-looking application just won't impress.

We make customized electronic medical record formats for physicians. We've been using multi-select list boxes to enter various choices together as part of a single column in many DataWindows in our applications. They help enter some interrelated data faster without creating an independent table and/or nested report.

PowerBuilder 11 introduces the WebForms target, which lets you transform an existing PowerBuilder application into a Web application with relative ease. While the deployed application will be remarkably faithful to the original client/server deployment in terms of application behavior, the degree of faithfulness is limited by the fact that your application is running as a Web application. The PowerBuilder component where this poses the greatest challenge is the DataWindow.

This article is about Oriam's real-life experience of porting its Clinical Trials Management System, EC1-TrialManager, to the Web. The product, initially designed as a PowerBuilder/Oracle client/server application, contained more than 300 screens.

Why upgrade to PowerBuilder 11? Here are some interesting and compelling reasons in my opinion... First, before we even get into the PowerBuilder details, PB 11 will be shipping with the new SQL Anywhere version 10 DBMS. This newest release is 'jam-packed' with over 200 new features and performance improvements so this DBMS engine will rival the big guys like Oracle, DB/2, SS2005 - but at a fraction of the price.

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

When we talk about AJAX and its huge impact on Web development, one important thing to mention is that it's not a ready-to-ship component that you just plug into your app and now you're Web 2.0. In fact, what AJAX can do for you is to provide a simple, yet powerful way to make transparent server requests; but nothing more than that. The important point with AJAX is what to do with it. In other words, how do we use it to improve the user experience?

In DataWindow.NET 2.0, Sybase added support for access to Oracle through the Oracle managed data provider (ODP.NET). A managed data provider provides better performance and more support than a non-managed driver for database-specific functions, though not as much as the Oracle native driver.

As I started a new PocketBuilder application and wanted to encompass some of the 'context sensitive' help features that I have previously used in a PowerBuilder application. I knew that this was not going to be easy, as the Pocket PC operating system does not support the (Multiple Document Interface) behavior. As a result, neither the Micro-Help bar nor pop-up help (also known as 'bubble help') are available as they would be in a standard PowerBuilder application. PowerBuilder developers also use a nice feature named 'PowerTipText' that allows automatic 'bubble' help to appear during a mouse hover.

What do you do if suddenly your application has to be used in another country, or even in different areas of the same nation? English and French are spoken in Canada; Italian, French, and German are spoken in Italy; and Switzerland has four official languages.

As we mentioned in Part 1 (PBDJ, Vol. 12, issue 7), we needed to implement spell checking in the rich edit fields in our application (see Figures 1 and 2). To do that, we got a license for the Sentry Spelling Checker Engine from Wintertree Software (www.wintertree- software.com).

In this article we'll discuss connectivity requirements, Informix-specific data type processing, and the use of Informix stored procedures within the PowerBuilder environment.

What we needed to do was implement spell checking in the rich edit fields in our application (see Figures 1 and 2). To do that, we got a license for the Sentry Spelling Checker Engine from Wintertree Software (www. wintertree-software.com). The utility is easily implemented and works quite well on standard Rich Edit controls.