PowerBuilder Use Survey Results

The results of the latest poll by Novalys on PowerBuilder use are in. The results are good. A lot of people are still using PowerBuilder and intend to continue to do so for some time. An increasing number of those are using PowerBuilder to do new development work, rather than simply maintaining existing applications. The number of developers on a particular project has increased over previous years.

What I found particularly interesting is that the majority of people are using PowerBuilder versions 8 and 9. Only slightly over 1% of the respondents indicating they were using version 10. Perhaps Unicode support was not as important as was first thought. Hopefully, version 11 will offer some more compelling reasons to migrate. Note that one-half the respondents indicated they will upgrade in the next year, so that may indicate people moving to version 10, just not that quickly.

Web Services Changes

The W3C and OASIS have a number of new standards for web services. The one of particular interest to PowerBuilder developers will be XOP (XML-binary Optimized Packaging), a standard means of transmitting binary data via XML. The others MTOM (Message Transformation Optimization Mechanism) and RRSHB (Resource Representation SOAP Header Block) are more under-the-covers implementations to improve performance. Unfortunately, the other key headache for web services developers is security, and those bodies are only starting to develop a common consensus on a new standard in that area.

Blue Marble

If you're into Geographical Information Systems, you might want to take a look at Blue Marble. They just announced a free evaluation version of their toolkit which "will allow developers to embed sophisticated image reprojection and tiling in their applications in a matter of minutes with just a few function calls."

Microsoft MVP program…

Rumors that Microsoft was going to do away with their MVP program (essentially the equivalent of TeamSybase) have been put to rest. Actually, their program is just a bit bigger. There are 30 TeamSybase members, and there are something like 2,600 Microsoft MVPs. Part of what was haunting the MVP program is their recent rapid growth: 3 years ago there were only 600 MVPs.

The MVP program was patterned after TeamSybase (actually TeamPowersoft at the time). Microsoft hosted a meeting with a number of TeamPowersoft members shortly before they launched their program. Can't take too much credit though, TeamSybase was patterned after Borland's TeamB, which has been around quite a bit longer. One big difference with the MVP program is that the memberships are only good for one year, you have to keep being re-selected. TeamSybase (and TeamB) membership is continuous provided that you continue to meet program requirements. For a glimpse of the early days of the MVP program, you might check out the following article on one of the first MVP summits.

Further SmartPhone Adventures…

A while back I wrote about why I had switched from an iPAQ PocketPC to a Motorola SmartPhone, and how I was excited about the introduction of SmartPhone support in version 2.0 of PocketBuilder (formerly Pocket PowerBuilder). At the time, I was looking forward to upgrading from a Motorola MPx200 to an MPx220.

More bad news for the Palm OS…

but good news for PocketBuilder. A recently released study shows that the Microsoft OS has moved into the market share leading position for PDA, with 48.1 percent of worldwide shipments for new units. While Windows moved to 41.2 percent a year ago to 48.1 percent this year, the Palm OS moved from 46.9 percent down to 29.8 percent. This is during a time when the worldwide shipment of PDAs increased by 13.6 percent.

The article also notes that the SmartPhone market is increasing significantly faster than the PDA market, and that the current market leading OS in that space is Symbian. I expect that to change though, much as Microsoft has overtaken Palm in the PDA space. One of the few times you'll find me rooting for Microsoft....

More on the demise of the PDA…

More evidence of the shift from PDAs to the smartphone platform: Zelos Group and other take on the IDC report.

The SmartPhone boom may also be indicated by the renewed interest in that platform as a target for internet based apps. Yahoo has just introduced mobile versions of Yahoo Search and Yahoo Local, responding to Google's support for the mobile platform, particularly their recent introduction of Google SMS.

And as evidence of the growing support for the Windows Mobile platform for the smartphone, there are reports that palmOne may introduce a Pocket PC flavored Treo, which didn't do much to help out the share price of it's corporate sibling PalmSource.

While you may not have a decent keyboard on your smartphone, they do have a mouse for them now.

The down side is that if your phone is from Kyocera you might want to watch out for this. One more good reason to use a hands-free device: to keep you cell-phone from exploding in your ear.