The Texas Workforce Commission, a state agency that oversees workforce development programs, needed to overhaul its popular client/server application to keep up with growth in size and functionality. Using Sybase technology, it was able to re-architect and re-implement the application, reducing both the size and frequency of client releases.

According to the programmers' guide provided with EAS (5.x), a Web application is a unit of deployment for interrelated Web content, JavaServer Pages (JSPs), and Java servlets. Generally, a Web application developer under EAS must create JSP files and/or Java servlets. Sometimes, however, it would be better to use some other techniques to save development time. It is possible that there is already a similar open source Web page, or there might be a demand to run a complete Web application not written in Java/JSP code under EAS.

Enable, a framework-level tool that makes PowerBuilder applications multilingual, has announced version 1.5 with enhanced performance in terms of speed and the handling of special cases, and a full treatment of 'right to left' languages.

PowerBuilder has almost entirely lost mind share. In order to reintroduce PowerBuilder to a new generation of developers, Sybase should treat it like a new product. When it was originally being developed, PowerSoft used the product internally and also partnered with clients, providing them with insight into what new features and improvements to existing features were needed. That same kind of insight is missing today. By partnering with key customers, Sybase can gain better knowledge about how the product is currently being used and which areas need improvement.

Finally, here is a solution that will resolve, once and for all, a problem I've been having ever since I started my development: how to easily secure my application according to the user profile.

Software is the engine of our economy, at the root of almost everything we do. Our success rate has been creeping up in recent years, but one thing is sure: there has been no major breakthrough. What will it take?

Sybase announced the availability of Sybase PowerBuilder 10.5, the next-generation rapid application development tool. PowerBuilder 10.5 features key functionality enhancements and improves the DataWindow, an industry leading patented data access, presentation, and manipulation tool. These enhancements provide total integration for client/server, distributed, and mobile applications.

?'For the past five years, Sybase has intently focused its engineering and acquisition strategy on delivering the Unwired Enterprise,' said John Chen, Sybase chairman,' CEO and president. 'With the launch of Information Anywhere Suite, Sybase is the first software provider to offer enterprise customers a single integrated platform for mobile email, security and device management, and application enablement, underscoring our leadership in the Unwired Enterprise space.'

One of the first things you'll notice when you open up the File->New->DataWindow dialog in DataWindow Designer 2.0 is the new TreeView DataWindow presentation style (see Figure 1). Once you've double-clicked on that, you'll see the same series of dialogs that you're already familiar with from the other presentation styles in which you select the data source, the tables to use, the columns in the tables, etc.

Statistics Canada provides aggregated census, social and economic survey information to the public while protecting sensitive details - and offering multi-years' worth of data online using Sybase technology.

PBDR.com announced a major upgrade of PBDoc to version 3.0. PBDoc is a tool for generating professional documentation directly from PowerBuilder source code.

Microsoft Visual Studio has excellent multi-language support both at design time and runtime, while Sybase DataWindow.NET doesn't have that. In this article we'll consider how to implement multi-language data presentation using DataWindow.NET. DataWindow.NET has two integral parts. One of them is intended to work in WinForms, the other in WebForms. In this article we'll use WinForms; however, our solutions are suitable for WebForms too.

Sybase announced support for the new Motorola Q. The Motorola Q combined with Sybase iAnywhere mobile technologies gives users greater control of their applications and enables companies to effectively manage and move critical data and content from the data center to the front lines of their business and back.

Recently, I needed to have FTP support embedded in a PowerBuilder application that I was writing for my day job. Since PowerBuilder lacks the ability to natively manipulate sockets (a big negative, Sybase), a third-party solution had to be found or I was going to be tempting the wrath of the Windows API, something I wasn't looking forward to doing.

In the first article we presented a some theories about the ClassDefinition object and were able to show the libraries of a PB application in a treeview control. This month we'll read the objects from the libraries and inspect their content. When a user expands an entry in the treeview, we check to see if it was expanded once already. If it was, we don't take any action.

Not everybody is a seasoned PowerBuilder user, but a great deal of the documentation and samples are written as if they were. People who are new to the product need to be able to establish an early meaningful success with the product in order to form a good first impression. As Kathy Sierra notes.

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.

Sybase WorkSpace seamlessly combines data development, Web applications, services-oriented development of application (SODA) and mobile development with enterprise modeling. New functionality in Sybase WorkSpace 1.5 includes a Web application development component, increased support for database development and industry-leading packaging and licensing.

When we last left off, we had a functional shell of an application. We had a menu that would open our five different sheets (Controls, Users, Messages, Menus, and Contacts); we had the shell of those five sheets themselves; we had some basic shared functionality with regards to managing sheets (arranging sheets, closing all open sheets); we had some basic shared DataWindow/DataStore error handling in the DBError event of our base-class u_dw and n_ds objects; we had some basic transaction management hooks in place in our base-class n_tr transaction object.

This month we'll take an in-depth look at the new features introduced or existing features enhanced in DataWindow.NET 2.0. In summary, DataWindow.NET 20 includes the following:

The newest version of the market's favorite 4GL RAD tool, PowerBuilder, is now available! This all-time classic has always enabled developers to quickly and easily build the critical data-driven applications they need. Now, it's even better and souped-up with the features you need to accelerate your application development.

Novalys is conducting its annual Worldwide PowerBuilder Survey. When you complete the survey you can see the 2005 results.

When Silicon Valley's renowned Kepler's Books almost folded in August 2005, loyal patrons grieved, but no one in the book business was surprised. Statistics from the American Booksellers Association show that many bookstores operate in the red.

Last year I wrote an article for PBDJ, PowerBuilder Developer's Journal, on the 'History of PowerBuilder'. You can still read this article online at: http://pbdj.sy s-con.com/read/124571.htm . Thanks to the Belgian PowerBuilder User Group it has been translated into French (and I also heard Italian). Now, thanks to Tiger Chen at Sybase China, it has also been translated into Chinese.

Did you know you can make automated installs for your PocketPC and SmartPhone applications created with PocketBuilder? When you use a PocketBuilder project to compile your application, it automatically creates an _setup.ini file that can be fed to a third-party EZSetup program to create the installation executable (see Listing 1). It also creates a _makecab.bat file that is used to create the CAB file (see Listing 2). The project even automatically executes that file. That batch file includes a commented-out call to the EZSetup program.

I'm the 'tech chair' of SYS-CON's 10th annual SOA and WebServices conference that will take place on June 5-6 in New York City. Last week I've invited Joel Spolsky to make a keynote speech at this event. Guess what, Joel has accepted my invitation! If you have a chance to attend this talk, you won't regret it. Joel is one of the most respected people in the software industry. He is a brilliant writer and speaker. Try not to miss this opportunity.

First the good news: PowerBuilder is a great tool; in fact you can't accidentally do much wrong. This strength is based on a number of reasons. The following is list of why I think PowerBuilder is so great, but you might like to add one or two more items to it:

PowerBuilder provides the send() function to send messages to the Windows objects. The information about its usage is fragmentary and widely dispersed throughout the help and manuals. Since searching for this information was quite tedious, I decided to write down what information I could gather.

The ClassDefinition object was introduced in PowerBuilder 6.0 a long time ago. It allows you to retrieve information for an object at runtime. Most of us didn't pay too much attention to this object and it only attracts our attention when we see it in the debugger.

We begin this article by answering a few questions. Namely, what is VoIP? What is Skype? And why would you want to integrate these capabilities into your PowerBuilder applications?

It's that time again - I was invited to be the guest editor for another issue of PBDJ. It's the second time now, and I want to say thank you to the many people who helped me a lot within the past year.

One of the first things you'll notice when you open up the File -> New -> DataWindow dialog is the new TreeView DataWindow presentation style (see Figure 1). The first thing you'll actually notice is that all of the IDE icons have more of an XP style, but then you'll notice the new presentation style. Once you've double-clicked on that you'll see the same series of dialogs that you're already familiar with from the other presentation styles, in which you select the data source, the tables to use, the columns in the tables, etc.

One of the 'new' features in PowerBuilder 10.5 was actually initially introduced in the PowerBuilder 10.2 maintenance release. The folks at Sybase finally addressed a number of fundamental issues with database tracing for deployed applications.

PowerBuilder 10.5 is almost ready, and I'm sure you have a lot of questions about what's in the release and how it can make your job easier. You are also probably wondering why it's called '10.5,' how it fits in with our roadmap for PowerBuilder, and what our plans are for tools in general, especially in light of the news that Borland is selling off its IDE product set. I will attempt to answer those questions and more in this update on the latest release.

After continually reinstalling my PocketBuilder application, ASA, and PocketBuilder on my Symbol handheld scanner unit each time I rebooted the unit, I felt 'enough is enough...'

In addition to the other new features in PowerBuilder 10.5 that we've covered in this issue, there are a number that do bear mentioning but aren't significant enough to merit a separate article. I've grouped them together in this 'miscellaneous' enhancements discussion. I'm going to look at a few of those, pretty much in alphabetical order.

Two things have my interest these days: the arrival of PB 10.5 and TechWave 2006! (Yes, that's right, I'm already planning ahead.) So, I thought I'd take this opportunity to roll a little application using MS MapPoint to illustrate what's new in PowerBuilder 10.5 Web services as well as help me plot my way from Chicago to Las Vegas for this year's conference! (see Figure 1).

One of the long awaited features introduced in PowerBuilder 10.5 is support for contemporary (aka Office XP) menus and toolbars. The first difference you'll notice is that the flat contemporary style and new icons are used extensively throughout the PowerBuilder IDE itself (Figure 1).

One new long-anticipated feature of PowerBuilder 10.5 was originally planned for the PowerBuilder 10.0 release: the new Rich Text Edit (RTE) control. The original RTE control (see Figure 1) was introduced into PowerBuilder before Microsoft implemented a Rich Edit Control within the Windows Common Controls. Since there wasn't a 'standard' rich edit control in the operating system, many developers were using third-party controls to implement such functionality. In addition, at that point, cross-platform availability was a requirement, since PowerBuilder was available for development on Mac and UNIX platforms. One of the most popular third-party controls was called HighEdit, and the original PowerBuilder RTE control was an OEM version of that control.

This month we take an in-depth look at the new features introduced or existing features enhanced in PowerBuilder 10.5. Even though it is not a full point release, it (like 6.5) is a full major release. In order to get many of these enhancements to the user (you and me) sooner, Sybase split off a subset of the original enhancements planned for the 11.0 release. The stuff that is centered around .NET deployment remains in the 11.0 feature set. In the meantime, the features that were not .NET deployment-related are available now.