Show Report

Martyn Mallick and Ian Thain then came on stage to demonstrate recent enhancements in PocketBuilder. The only downside is that they were still using the Insurance Agent demo application. While the intent is to demo new features, the continued reuse of the same application for the demo is getting old. I think I've seen at least four or five demos using that same application. What they did demonstrate was remote debugging and automatic adjustment for screen orientation changes. They also noted that even Visual Studio can't deploy to all of the platforms that PocketBuilder does (PPC 2002, WM 2003, WM2003SE, SP 2003, Win CE, and WM 5.0).

As far as PocketBuilder futures, they indicated the road map is:

• PK 2.0.3 Q4 2005 - Remote debugging, WM5.0
• PK 2.5 Q1 2006 - .NET object support, multiple orientation layout painter
• PK 3.0 based on PB 11 code line and DataWindows

They finished with a case study of ELMO ICT solutions, an IT firm that provides solutions to home care providers to automate much of their paperwork. That company has 10,000 users making 100,000 synchronizations per day (2.5 million synchronizatoins per month) all to a single ASA database.

Jim O'Neil spoke on where engineering is going. Finally, all the presenters came back on stage, along with Sue Dunnell, and proceeded to throw T-shirts into the audience.

Wednesday, August 24
Sessions
I finally managed to catch an a.m. session: Marty Mallick's presentation on RFID 101 - "Understanding RFID." During the discussion on different readers, Reed Shilts noted that there is an RFID reader available for PocketPCs as well. The Wireless Dynamics SDID reader comes in a SD memory card form factor.

Lunch was in the exhibit hall. Well done as far as I could tell, I spent most of the time in the PBDJ booth.

Next stop was Xue-song Wu's presentation on PB.NET. Unfortunately I got there late (I had to tear down the PBDJ booth first) and Xue-song finished early, so I got to see only a small portion of his presentation. I think most people were somewhat disappointed as all they have ready to demonstrate is using PB to compile a console application that uses .NET components (rather than a GUI application).

My final p.m. session was Evan Ireland's on the "PowerBuilder Application Server Plugin." It was composed of several pieces:

• Deployment Tool (wraps PB as EJB)
• Server Runtime Library
• Remote Debugging Component
• Web DataWindow Component
• Proxy Server (permits PB clients to call deployed PB components without a local JVM)

The supported application servers are:

• Geronimo 1.0
• JBoss 4.0
• Oracle 10
• WebLogic 8.1
• WebSphere 6.0
• Others may work, but your mileage may vary

The supported platforms are:

• Development
• Windows
• Server
• Windows
• Solaris
• AIX
• HP/UX

Evan asked if anybody was interested in a Linux version, and nobody responded.

Supported PB versions:

• 10+ is supported
• 9.0 isn't supported, but you can try

Also, if an EAServer PBVM patch comes out, it's recommended you apply it to the PASP as well. You can install multiple copies on the machine, each copy in a separate installation directory. Incidentally, the "plumbing" isn't PBNI; it's an interface that was developed in the PB8 days so that EAServer could call into the PBVM. It's just been extended to other application servers.

The deployment tool will wrap your PB NVOs as standard EJB session beans. Target-specific deployment descriptors are generated to automate the binding of JNDI names and JDBC data source resource references. Use the %PB_SERVER_HOME%/config/pb-server-XXX.xml file to map PB cache names to JNDI names for JDBC data services. This applies even when using native drivers. You can use SQLCA within your component, and each component will have its own private copy of SQLCA. There are special JDBC driver classes and database URLs to use when using native drivers so they get managed as if they were JDBC connections even though they're native drivers. If you need a two-phase commit, you currently need to use JDBC. Support for native drivers may come later. Sybase Open Client has been working for a while. Oracle native has just been implemented. Still working on ODBC.

PowerBuilder components don't return arrays. Instead, define a structure type and then make one component an array. For improved performance, use PB NVO instance variables and create the datastore and assign the dataobject in the NVO constructor (setting the dataobject to a datastore is a very expensive operation). But check application server memory usage. For error logging, use the Errorlogging class.

Supported Methods for the TransactionServer class are:

• CreateInstance
• DisableCommit
• EnableCommit
• IsCallerInRole
• IsTransactionAborted
• SetAbort
• SetComplete

CreateInstance - use the two-argument form and specify the full JDNI name of the target component. If the NVO making the call is not in the same EJB-JAR as the component being called, you might have issues with the class loader. Sybase does not support cross EJB calls; you have to work with your application server vendor to see if it is supported. It is supported in EAServer.

Proxy server - you can specify multiple proxy servers for failover/load balancing. It supports a proxy cluster, so the clients don't have to have all addresses (you still list more than one in the client file, but not all of them). However, don't set up the proxy server unless you are going to call from PowerBuilder clients. Shared and Service type-components are only supported by EAServer.