Sybase, Inc. , a leading provider of enterprise infrastructure and mobile software, today reported financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2007.

The Novalys company has just launched a new version of Visual Expert, a tool that automates impact analysis, generates source code documentation and checks code quality. The new Visual Expert version 5.7 analyzes both PowerBuilder and related Stored Procedure code (Sybase ASE, Oracle and Microsoft SQLServer DBMS's are supported). This version also now supports the soon to be released PowerBuilder 11!

Novalys has just launched a new version of Visual Expert, a tool that automates impact analysis, generates source code documentation, and checks code quality. Visual Expert 5.7 analyzes both PowerBuilder and Stored Procedures code (Sybase ASE, Oracle and Microsoft SQLServer supported). It also supports PowerBuilder 11. This updated version comes with several new features such as exporting a result in an Excel file, an extremely fast string search (covering both PB and DB code), and much more.

In ASE 12.0 we introduced official file system device support via the device-level dsync flag. Since then, many a DBA has pondered 'to dsync, or not to dsync?' This tends to be part of the larger question of file versus raw. Like just about anything related to performance, there is not really a yes or no answer that fits all cases. In this article I'll try to further your understanding of this and other device options.

Text messaging is cool. Voice messaging is even cooler. Wouldn't it be great to be able to add that functionality to your PowerBuilder apps as well? For example, when an event occurs within your application, let your users receive real-time notification via SMS or voice messaging to their cell phones! This article will focus on writing Web services to do just that using the Strike Iron SMS and PhoneNotify messaging services.

Fast, easy, consistent - today we expect services to be delivered rapidly, with ease, and the utmost precision. We expect instant access and on-demand service from our cable providers and online retailers so why don't the same principles apply to areas of real business needs such as compliance software? Now they do. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has begun to take an aggressive hold, offering a wide range of applications to a variety of industries. In many instances, SaaS has become the de facto choice for businesses looking to upgrade their key business solutions. Nowhere is this shift towards SaaS more evident than in the government risk and compliance (GRC) industry.

Sybase ASE 15 supports the use of many optimization techniques and tools. The use of these tools requires an expert level of understanding since improper application of query optimization tools can degrade performance for ASE as a whole. In this excerpt, the following optimization techniques are discussed from a standpoint of how to recognize problems resulting from the improper application of optimization strategies in ASE 15.

Profit Tools is able to rapidly create an affordable, full-function, extensible and scalable solution that has been enthusiastically embraced by small to mid-sized commercial trucking companies. Nearly 200 companies have implemented Profit Tools; these customers are realizing significant bottom-line results.

Amyuni Technologies launches v3.0 of its PDF Converter, PDF Creator and PDF Suite products. All products are now Microsoft Vista compatible, with full support for both PDF and XPS and offere extremely accurate conversion of any type of document into PDF and XPS, the company says.

Amyuni Technologies has released v3.0 of its PDF Converter, PDF Creator, and PDF Suite products, now Microsoft Vista compatible, with support for both PDF and XPS. They offer a complete solution for creating, converting, and processing both PDF and XPS documents.

Today nearly every organization relies on some form of information technology. Companies of all sizes are increasingly dependent upon computer systems and networks to enable a wide range of critical business processes. It follows that companies are allocating increasing amounts of their overall budget to the IT department for hardware and software purchases, system maintenance, and IT personnel and training. With IT budgets becoming such a sizeable portion of overall corporate spending, it's crucial that business leaders base their IT spending decisions on comprehensive, meaningful systems' performance data.

Pick up any book or article on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and somewhere in the text will be the statement that SOA isn't about throwing away existing systems and redeveloping them, but integrating them into new SOA processes, SOA processes that are flexible enough to change through characteristics that are loosely coupled, course-grained, standards-based, business-oriented and patterns-based, as described by my colleague David Brandow in PBDJ October 2006.

This article will talk first about what constitutes a .NET Smart Client, its attributes, its behaviors, and then we'll talk about how the Intelligent Updater feature fits into PowerBuilder 11's .NET Smart Client support initiative. Finally, we'll walk through a detailed tutorial on how you can use the Intelligent Updater to install, publish, and update your .NET Windows Form-deployed PowerBuilder applications easily.

Natexis Bleichroeder, Inc., a subsidiary of Natexis Banques Populaires, is a specialized investment bank based in New York with offices in several other U.S. cities and affiliates in London and Paris. The firm specializes in global equity sales, trading, and capital markets activities, and executes trades in more than 60 countries including the U.S., Europe, Asia, and emerging markets.

Over the past year, I've been discussing some of the various technologies found inside SQL Server 2005. Three of these technologies are CLR integration, HTTP endpoints, and Service Broker. (Articles on these topics were published, respectively, in the November 2005, March 2006, and November 2006 editions of the DNDJ.) Each of these is a powerful tool in its own right, and can be used to great effect in almost any SQL installation. When used together, however, they become much more powerful. Used together, these tools let SQL Server become an active participant in a service-oriented system. Not only can SQL Server provide the data used by these services but it can host the services themselves. This is an example of what Microsoft calls a 'Service-Oriented Database Architecture' or SODA, and it's another powerful capability of the SQL Server 2005 system.

DataWindow display formats aren't a big secret. Most PowerBuilder developers use them to format numeric, date, time, and string values properly. Such display formats are usually straightforward and contain characters that have special meaning for a specific datatype like '#' for numeric values or '@' for string values. However, the DataWindow display format is a very powerful tool and you can get more than simple data formatting. This article explores what you can do with DataWindow display formats demonstrating a few tricks.

Over the years we've been offered, either by Sybase or by third-party companies, a number of 'move PowerBuilder to the Web' offerings. Focusing specifically on those offered by Sybase, we were first offered Web.pb. It was provided as a set of libraries with PowerBuilder 6 that was built on the Distributed PowerBuilder (DPB) technology introduced with PowerBuilder 5. It actually worked fairly well for developing Web front-ends to non-visual components in an n-tier environment. However, its dependence on DPB spelled its doom once DPB was de-supported in favor of EAServer.

By now, you've probably heard about Eclipse as 'the Open Source Java IDE' (www.eclipse.org). Today, several companies have looked past the Java IDE plug-ins provided as part of Eclipse, and are creating products that use Eclipse as a tool integration platform, both inside and outside of the Java arena. But what about using royalty-free, Open Source Eclipse technology as a general-purpose application framework for your next desktop, fat client, or embedded application? With the support provided by the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and the embedded version of the same (eRCP) the idea is certainly not as strange as it first sounds.

Companies are under tremendous pressure to meet the complex business requirements found in their IT infrastructures. For example, they need to expose their applications to external trading partners, comply with government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, integrate merged companies or their own complex application environments.

SYS-CON Events (www.sys-con.com) announced today that AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West (www.ajaxworld.com) willtake place on September 24-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Centerin Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to attract over 2,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of everystripe who will be converging in Silicon Valley to attend the most comprehensive meeting on the West Coast, covering the most significant technology subjects of recent times: AJAX, Rich Internet Apps & Web 2.0.

Open sourcing Java won't matter - it's a non-event. Ruby and Ruby on Rails won't make it in 2007 either. I still do not see a compelling reason to switch. AJAX hype is stronger than I thought mainly because of the life support offered by frameworks like GWT. But still, I'm not going to recommend enterprise IT shops make any serious investments in AJAX.

When building the right project team to complete a custom solution there are many forces at work. These include business drivers, technical drivers, and organizational and political motivations. Regardless of the business or organization there are three basic rules to follow in building a team to deliver a technical solution. The first is to involve the business before the team is even assembled. Each organization has certain technology standards that govern specific tools and products that can be used on a given project.

Founded in 1982 as a spin-off of the University of Ghent, Belgium, Bayer BioScience is one of the main innovation and research centers for Bayer CropScience. It is now a division of the multinational chemical, medical, and biotechnology concern Bayer AG. With its frequent mergers and acquisitions, Bayer BioScience required seamless evolution and future-proof software development, along with a means of meeting the exponentially growing performance requirements caused by scaling local operations into a multinational group.

In my last few articles I have tried to show how to build Business Processes (BPs) and how to use them with PowerBuilder. This article will cover how to build a simple JSF within Sybase WorkSpace to call those BPs. My engineering colleague Jean Choi wrote recently about Web application development, but my aim here is to show you, step-by-step, how easy it is.

The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is the largest trust in the UK. It provides acute services for the population of Leeds and is a regional center for the treatment of illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. The Trust employs more than 15,000 staff across eight sites and treats 125,000 inpatients, 65,000 day cases, and 700,000 outpatients each year. Its annual budget is more than £580 million.

In today's world of network computers our important documents are usually widely dispersed on several computers in our networks. Over a period of time, we forget their location and searching for these files on a huge network turns out to be a frustrating experience. Such searches are typically not only time-consuming, but also consume valuable and scarce network resources. This article provides an elegant solution to this problem.

What made Web application development initially so successful was that Web applications looked pretty. They usually included graphics made by graphic design experts. What makes them so unsuccessful nowadays is that they provide a very poor user interface. End users understood that being pretty isn't as important as being easy-to-use and they want the best of both worlds.

(OK, let me start off by acknowledging that in the literary work I am alluding to, Juliet is not asking this question because she's looking for Romeo. She's actually lamenting that he comes from the rival family. But it's so commonly misunderstood that I thought it would be useful nonetheless.)

Did you ever wonder where your kids are driving around on a Saturday night? Perhaps you are a business owner and need to know where your workforce is located on different job sites. With the help of PowerBuilder, a wireless connection, a GPS receiver, and Microsoft MapPoint, you can track the location of any individual in real-time. This article will show you how.

Distribution of data is the physical storage of data in different locations with access provided to the necessary data regardless of its location. Sometimes data is distributed for historical reasons; for example, when separate applications use different software and hardware. Sometimes data is distributed for a specific purpose: to speed up access by moving it closer to the end user, to improve reliability in the face of network failure, or because network connections are only occasionally available.

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?

Like Java and C# programmers, PowerBuilder developers can create properties via the undocumented keyword indirect. Properties look like ordinary variables, only their value isn't accessed directly. When you declare a variable using indirect, you have to specify a function that's called when the variable is assigned (a setter) and another function that's called when the variable's value is returned (a getter).

About this time of year folks make their predictions about what's coming up in the New Year. Not to be left out, here's mine, along with my thoughts on what these events will mean for you.

In this article I want to show you how easy it is to use the new Avaki perspective and what you can achieve in the areas of Data Federation and Integration. This feature is newly available within Sybase WorkSpace v1.6 and integrated into the Workbench IDE (Integrated Development Environment). What I won't cover in this article is the installation, set-up, and configuration of Avaki and how to create your first Avaki Grid Domain Controller (GDC). This is very well explained within the Avaki documentation.

A typical PowerBuilder application has a few zillion MessageBox() calls. This article explains how you can roll your own MessageBox() function, replacing the native PowerBuilder MB() function with your code.

New features of this release include the DataWindow Designer Visual Studio Plug-in. This is a set of plug-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It enables users to design DataWindow objects directly in Visual Studio instead of in the standalone DataWindow Designer from the previous versions. The standalone DataWindow Designer will not be distributed with DataWindow.NET 2.5.

Even though I write for SYS-CON, I've never publicly complimented them. But this time they really deserve a credit. SYS-CON will present the AJAXWorld 2007 Conference & Expo 2007 East in March. Usually, attendees have very limited access to speakers during conferences, and SYS-CON Events came out with a simple but smart idea - yesterday they have created an Ask The Faculty Forum, where anyone can post questions to the conference speakers and faculty. And you do not even have to attend the conference to participate in this forum. It's a very nice idea, or rather 'Idea 2.0' Speakers should visit the forum and answer the questions to promote their sessions, and software developers will have a chance to correspond with well known people in the industry. Yours truly will run Adobe Flex Hands-on Workshop during this event, so feel free to post relevant questions - it does not matter if you are planning to be there or not. I'm sure, other event organizers will start copycatting SYS-CON, which is a win-win situation for everyone.

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?

New Zealand's Industry Training Organizations (ITOs) went to market for a new trainee administration system based on an industry-standard database technology. Virtuosity, a provider of both custom and industry-specific software and hardware support and its Titan trainee administration system based on Sybase, proved the best fit for their requirements, teaming compliance with global standards, scalability from one to potentially hundreds of users without additional programming, and the ability to extend its systems to Pocket PC mobile device users.

Sybase's exciting new offering, WorkSpace, offers users an enormous amount of functionality in a unified design and development environment. From enterprise modeling, database development, Web application development, services-oriented development and orchestration to mobile development, it presents an extremely comprehensive set of tooling capabilities. Since it isn't possible do the entire tool justice in a single article, let's focus just on service development.