PowerBuilder has a very handy way to make data entry more convenient: the DropDownDataWindow and DropDownListBox edit styles for DataWindow columns. Indeed, it’s much simpler to pick up a value from a look-up list than to type it in each time you need to enter it. However, it looks lik...

This article will describe the development of a fairly large (over 4,000 users) one-man software business, selling an application developed with PowerBuilder. I’ll touch on a number of technical issues I encountered in the development of the program and the business. The DONATION pro...

When Sybase originally released PowerBuilder 10.0, one of the new features they added with that version was the PowerDesigner plug-in. There had been a number of IDE “add-in” third-party products for PowerBuilder before (e.g, SmartPaste, SmartJump), but this was the first time that Syb...

We are standing on the threshold of a new transition in information technology and communications; a radical departure from current practice that promises to bring us new levels of efficiency at a vastly reduced cost. Cloud computing is full of potential, bursting with opportunity and ...

BPEL is a mystery to me. EbXML? Sorry, not a clue. These things, of course, are about defining and executing business rules and processes in enterprise application servers. On my travels through the world of PowerBuilder applications I’ve frequently come across the need for business ru...

In today’s business world change is a constant and companies need to ensure that they keep up with that change. Whether the change is an opportunistic response to new conditions – requirements, regulations, market conditions, a merger/acquisition – or a major transformation, companies ...

Nowadays .NET has become a mainstream programming platform. To be inline with PowerBuilder’s .NET deployment and .NET development strategy, the PowerScript language will be enhanced to be a true CLS-compliant .NET language in PowerBuilder 12. Users will be able to consume and extend an...

Oracle has provided support for failing over database connections and, through Transparent Application Failover (TAF), doing so in a way that allows connected applications to continue functioning relatively uninterrupted during and after the failover. The connected application has to w...

A picture is worth a thousand words. We all have heard this saying a countless number of times. But what if you don’t understand what is drawn in the picture? I was approached once with a request to review requirements specifications for some module. The document contained a scheme tha...

For this article I'll focus on SQL Anywhere version 10 and PowerBuilder 11.0. Some of the features reviewed may not be supported in previous versions of these software releases. In Part 1 I discussed the installation of SQL Anywhere, developing a schema, and the Database Painter. In Pa...

.NET has become a mainstream programming platform. To be in line with PowerBuilder's .NET strategy (.NET deployment and .NET development), PB11 introduced many .NET-related features: its .NET compiler enables users to develop .NET Windows Forms (including SmartClient) applications and ...

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...

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 independ...

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,...

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 a...

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 transpar...

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 d...

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...

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 qu...