The text that is displayed is stored in a series of text files in the program directory, so you can customize it and extend it as needed.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Move aside AutoScript
Check out PBIntelli. It's an add-in written in PBNI which is faster than AutoScript and more powerful. In the example below, it's showing the columns in the DataWindow object in the DataWindow control being referenced. It's what AutoScript should have been.
The text that is displayed is stored in a series of text files in the program directory, so you can customize it and extend it as needed.
The text that is displayed is stored in a series of text files in the program directory, so you can customize it and extend it as needed.
Blog Mirroring
I'm mirroring this blog over on bruce.pbdjmagazine.com. Turns out, that's not exactly a complicated process. The JavaScript RSS Box Viewer allows me to do it with a simple line of JavaScript. It's useful if you just want to set up a sidebar to your blog entries (or someone else's) but it works great for mirroring as well.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Eating your own dog food
You might remember from my TechWave 2004 notes, "eating your own dog food" is my favorite means of describing a company opening using its own products in its public interface to their customers (e.g., their web site). If a company expects their customers to put faith in the utility and stability of the product, they should be showing that same confidence in the product themselves.
Well, we have another excellent example of Sybase doing that. Are you familiar with the search engine on Sybase? No, not that search engine! That was the old one that ran slowly and gave you useless results. Well, Sybase recently replaced that with a search engine built on EAServer accessing data stored in Adaptive Server Enterprise (which, incidentally, is the same technology combination I used for the newsgroup search engine on teamsybase.com, but I digress...). The end result is search results that come back quickly and are actually highly relavent. Perhaps Sybase could sell the solution to Microsoft's MSDN site, which could certainly use it.
Well, we have another excellent example of Sybase doing that. Are you familiar with the search engine on Sybase? No, not that search engine! That was the old one that ran slowly and gave you useless results. Well, Sybase recently replaced that with a search engine built on EAServer accessing data stored in Adaptive Server Enterprise (which, incidentally, is the same technology combination I used for the newsgroup search engine on teamsybase.com, but I digress...). The end result is search results that come back quickly and are actually highly relavent. Perhaps Sybase could sell the solution to Microsoft's MSDN site, which could certainly use it.
SmartPhone review
The folks at eWeek just did a review of the Motorola MPX220 that I was so hot for a while back (they also reviewed one Palm and one Blackberry device).
One interesting note from their review was the following: "we'd love to see smart-phone hardware and software vendors license SureType from RIM for inclusion in their products—the technology represents one of the best new ideas in mobile device input that we've seen in some time."
As I indicated in my last comments on the SmartPhone platform, the key hurdle is user input. It sounds like Blackberry has come up with an advance in that area. Most phones use the same letter to number key assignment as a house phone, which requires anywhere from two to four keypresses to obtain a single correct letter. The Blackberry keyboard uses a standard QWERTY typewriter layout, with only one or two letters assigned to each key. That makes it much easier for the predictive software to guess which letter you are trying to type.
By the way, I also mentioned in that last article that the Audiovox SMT5600 I'm now using and the Motorola MPX220 both use the mini-SD card rather than a standard sized SD memory card. Well, if you're as unfamiliar as I was with the mini-SD card at that time, you may not realize that the mini-SD card comes with an adapter that will allow it to work in a standard SD slot. Pretty slick.
One interesting note from their review was the following: "we'd love to see smart-phone hardware and software vendors license SureType from RIM for inclusion in their products—the technology represents one of the best new ideas in mobile device input that we've seen in some time."
As I indicated in my last comments on the SmartPhone platform, the key hurdle is user input. It sounds like Blackberry has come up with an advance in that area. Most phones use the same letter to number key assignment as a house phone, which requires anywhere from two to four keypresses to obtain a single correct letter. The Blackberry keyboard uses a standard QWERTY typewriter layout, with only one or two letters assigned to each key. That makes it much easier for the predictive software to guess which letter you are trying to type.
By the way, I also mentioned in that last article that the Audiovox SMT5600 I'm now using and the Motorola MPX220 both use the mini-SD card rather than a standard sized SD memory card. Well, if you're as unfamiliar as I was with the mini-SD card at that time, you may not realize that the mini-SD card comes with an adapter that will allow it to work in a standard SD slot. Pretty slick.
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.
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.
Monday, January 31, 2005
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.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
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."
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