Most new users of PowerBuilder start with SQL Anywhere as the back-end database engine (formerly Adaptive Server Anywhere or ASA, and before that Watcom). With growth, a need to shift and adapt to a wider database platform is thrust on developers by customers. A recent exercise in this...

In PowerBuilder 11.2, .NET meets J2EE head-on with the capability to deploy .NET Windows Forms and Web Forms applications (as well as assemblies and Web Services) that access Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) in Sybase's own EAServer. As you'll see over the course of this article, integratin...

PowerBuilder 11 deploys entire applications as .NET Windows Form or Web Form applications and deploys individual components as .NET Assemblies and as .NET Web Services. Version 11 consumes resources of the default .NET framework as well as resources of custom developer-defined .NET res...

The lines between embedded and enterprise computing are blurring. As embedded devices become more and more networked, they form a perimeter at the edge of our enterprise data centers and a rich source of real-time, real-world information. These newcomers to the enterprise are coming of...

In this article we're going to take a database and create our own mini version of an 'Amazon-like' item lookup. That is to say, any .NET or .NET-compatible client will be able to look up items in our database via the Web by simply providing a UPC. This article will show you how. To com...

XML is increasingly being used as the language of data exchange. An XML document based on a DTD or an XML Schema contains data that conforms to a standard structure. A number of technologies, such as ebXML (Electronic Business XML), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integrati...

Does your shipping department have these problems? Extra charges due to incorrect addresses? Difficulty tracking packages? How about duplicate entries? If your shipping department is really ancient, you may even have rolls of preprinted UPS shipping labels. Here's how you can seamlessl...

In June of 2007, Sybase released PowerBuilder 11. PowerBuilder developers can now deploy PowerBuilder components as .NET Assemblies or as .NET Web Services. A PowerBuilder developer can now create these .NET resources so that those who develop .NET solutions can benefit from PowerBuild...

A shortcoming of PocketBuilder 1.x and 2.x has always been the difficulty in accessing Web Services. This shortcoming had always irritated us, but the limitations of the PocketPC and the size of the traditional PowerBuilder approach prevented us from providing an adequate traditional s...

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys li...

The release-defining feature of PowerBuilder 11 is its ability to deploy existing applications as .NET Windows Forms and Web Forms applications and components of business logic, namely custom-class user objects (NVOs), as .NET assemblies and Web Services. Although PowerBuilder's adopti...

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. S...

PBDJ's readers ask us from time to time what the most popular article in the magazine has been over recent years. We are delighted to report that the answer is that it is one by our very own and much loved editor-in-chief, Bruce Armstrong. We first published it in 2005. Here it is agai...

In the adventurous world of software development, we have all come to experience, criticize, and embrace many software lifecycle approaches (e.g., RUP, Agile, Scrum, XP, etc.). At their core, they intend to identify various stages in the software process and optimize their instrumentat...

When I was just starting my career in programming, I thought I would be creating new applications. And I did - I created a few applications from scratch. Maybe two or three of them. But for the most part what I've been doing is working with code written by someone else a while ago - le...

SMS or Short Messaging Service is being used by millions of mobile phone users as you read this article. Here is a fact...Sybase 365 aids the delivery of nearly 6 billion messages each month. Originally limited to 160 characters and the small phone keyboard, SMS language was born on De...

Roughly two years ago, when I was writing an article on 'New Features for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2005' that was published in the August 2005 issue of .NET Developer's Journal, our program management team was already busy shaping the next release of the product, which is soo...

I just wanted to acknowledge the tremendous increase in the amount of Blog activity that I have received over the past year. I think (and hope) that this is because many Sybase professionals out there have come to visit my site for latest information on the Sybase scene. Since I starte...

Software testing is an indispensable part of software development; it aims to assess the software quality and confirm whether the functions meet the requirements defined at the start of the project. In 1990 the IEEE/ANSI defined testing as: 'The process of operating a system or compone...

In the past decade, the software industry has evolved significantly, especially in the enterprise application development area. And the biggest evolution has been the transition from client/server applications to Web based applications.

Six years ago I was asked to implement a data repository to hold network management and performance data. With monitoring systems, databases have a tendency to be large, and have a delicate balance between inserting (logging) new data and deleting old (aging) data out from the system. ...

This article describes the architecture and features of the Web application development tooling in WorkSpace 1.5, how to develop these powerful JSF DataWindow components, and then use them in a JSF Web application, as well as how to integrate Web applications into a Service Oriented Ar...

I used to implement SMTP for PowerBuilder using a PBNI class that used P.J. Naughter's CPJNSMTPConnection MFC class to do the heavy lifting. Well, .NET 2.0 changes all that. One of the new features of .NET 2.0 is the introduction of a SMTPClient class. One of the features of .NET since...

At Nielsen Media Research (NMR), the Core Business Architecture group recently completed a project to evaluate where systems support business processes poorly or not at all. Our first challenge was to determine the format to use in capturing the information.

EAServer 6.0 brings with it many new and exciting changes on a number of fronts, not the least of which is its management console, EAServer Manager. Many of the changes wrought in the console are simple byproducts of the changes in the underlying server, so I won't delve into them. In...

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, howev...

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 creat...

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 cou...

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).

The PowerBuilder Application Server Plugin (PASP) is a new product offering from Sybase. It's currently in beta as part of the EAServer 6.0 beta; however, when released it will be distributed as a separate product. The PASP allows PowerBuilder developers to deploy PowerBuilder componen...

In a previous article (PBDJ, vol. 12, issue 5) I wrote about the best file formats for using Windows XP icons in PowerBuilder. In the summary of that article I mentioned how to create your own XP style icons. A number of people have since contacted me asking for more detail on how to c...

Sybase has recently included impact analysis features into the PowerDesigner (PD) modeling tool. If you aren't familiar with PD, it's a powerful tool for modeling business processes, data designs, XML messages, and application logic (ala UML). Within each model, you can view the depend...

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 Docu...

In the early days of Java, a sample application called Java Pet Store was introduced as a 'blueprint and guideline' for Java development. A few years later when Microsoft introduced .NET, they also provided a similar sample application to demonstrate preferred methods of coding for .NE...

For years, people have said that PowerBuilder Foundation Classes (PFC) has a steep learning curve. Drives me crazy. Don't believe it for a minute. While it's true that there is a lot to learn about PFC, the same can be said of cars, but few of us learn the intricacies of ignition syste...

The PowerBuilder DataWindow object is a powerful presentation component. By using the built-in DataWindow functions within DataWindow object expressions, complex user interfaces can be developed, and by using PowerBuilder's Windows ActiveX control the same component can be embedded in ...

We've heard the rumors. Could this really be the last version of PowerBuilder? Not by a long shot. We're busy creating and evolving your favorite product. I must admit, before joining Sybase I heard the rumors myself and wondered about their validity.

Over the past 10 years, corporations have experienced a dramatic change in the way they store and process information. In the early 1990s corporate information systems tended to be isolated from one another.

Your company decides to implement a mobile application initiative and has chosen which database, handheld, and software packages to use. A new year has begun and new projects will be started, so now is the time to think about what we are doing, what our jobs are, and how we understand ...

Time is passing, as that is its nature. Outside of overdone science fiction, there really is no moving backward. The future is variable-filled, uncertainty looming ahead like an audit of a badly run project. What do we dare in the coming days? What will this New Year hold for us IT pro...