Tuesday, October 16, 2012

PowerBuilder Developer's Conference - Day 2 - PowerBuilder Roadmap

Real Time Data Platform - incorporation of a number of Sybase tools into an integrated product. You can stay with the individual products, or you can migrate to the new platform.





Vishal Sikka and a number of other senior management people in SAP are former PowerBuilder developers and are enthusiastic about the product.

"PowerBuilder Classic enhancements" added to roadmap slide under "Mid Term" / "Already in Plan"


Showed some screen shots of a visual designer for mobile devices that SAP is working on that is based on PowerBuilder.


John then showed some demos of PowerBuilder 15 HTML5DataWindow (PowerBuilder.Net target type)
  • no scripting (Intended to be an HTML5 Infomaker)
  • supports drop down datawindows now
  • supposed to be supporting validation forumulas, but it wasn't working during demo
  • supports linking of datawindows within a composite datawindow so you create master/detail type relationships
  • deploys directly to IIS file system, using windows authentication to determine which users have access to different portions
  • demonstrated doing updates to the database and reading changes from another session
  • recommends learning CCS before HTML5

PowerBuilder will be on the SAP price book in November. At that point, their inside sales people at SAP can start selling the product. There are an order of magnitude more of them than they had with the 3rd party companies (e.g., rainmaker) under Sybase.

HANA Gateway -> OData based REST Web Services -> PowerBuilder DataWindow
OData shows up as another database profile type. So far only in PowerBuilder.Net.


SAP Netweaver Cloud - Just another app server that you'll be able to deploy to just as you could deploy to JBoss, Weblogic, Websphere using the Application Server Pllugin. Deploys as a servlet.
Next year's conference they want to be able to gamify it. They will give us a spec and we will create components that will be deployed to the cloud and that will then play rock, paper, scissors against other people's components. (Sue indicated we will start earlier than next conference).


Demoed dockable windows in PowerBuilder classic.


Follow up note:  The "Planned Innovation" and "Future Innovations" (or "Future Directions") categorization are an SAP standard approach to roadmaps for their products.  They apparently have a policy against announcing features in a particular version or give estimates of release dates.  I noted the very same layout in a number of roadmap discussions in other sessions for SAP products.

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