Novalys is doing their annual world wide PowerBuilder survey for 2006.
When you complete the survey you can see the results of last years survey.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
PowerBuilder 10.5 Launch Seminar
PowerBuilder 10.5 Launch Seminar
Lord’s Cricket Ground
London, England
March 8, 2006
AGENDA
09.30 Registration and refreshments
10.00 PB10.5 Features Overview and Walkthrough
Discover the new UI, toolbars from the new release of PowerBuilder.
- Treeview, a new DataWindow presentation style
- New DataWindow functionality, including autosize height on all bands
- User interface improvements with new icons, menus, toolbars, rich text control and datetime picker control
- New BYTE datatype
- Updated RDBMS support for Oracle and ASE 15
- Enhanced Web Services support for PowerBuilder clients. 10.5 has a Web Services implementation that supports .NET
11.00 Coffee break
11.15 PB for all your development
We uncover lesser known features of PowerBuilder that make your development easier. PowerBuilder Does That? - If you think PowerBuilder is all client/server, think again. PowerBuilder does distributed computing and lets you work in a J2EE environment.
- PB for Application Servers using the new PBVM plugin, enabling you to deploy PB applications with your choice of app server
- PB for Java. The JSF Datawindow will enable your Java developers to use PowerBuilder DataWindows
- PB for .NET. PowerBuilder and DataWindow .NET give you 4GL solutions to .NET development
- PB for Mobility. PocketBuilder enables you to build and deploy a mobile application in less an hour
- PB and the WEB. The WebDataWindow, did you know there is WEB authoring with PB, or Web DataWindow availability to JSP ?
12.45 Lunch
14.00 Discover the world of Lords Cricket Ground – Tour and visit to see the Ashes
Lord’s Cricket Ground
London, England
March 8, 2006
AGENDA
09.30 Registration and refreshments
10.00 PB10.5 Features Overview and Walkthrough
Discover the new UI, toolbars from the new release of PowerBuilder.
- Treeview, a new DataWindow presentation style
- New DataWindow functionality, including autosize height on all bands
- User interface improvements with new icons, menus, toolbars, rich text control and datetime picker control
- New BYTE datatype
- Updated RDBMS support for Oracle and ASE 15
- Enhanced Web Services support for PowerBuilder clients. 10.5 has a Web Services implementation that supports .NET
11.00 Coffee break
11.15 PB for all your development
We uncover lesser known features of PowerBuilder that make your development easier. PowerBuilder Does That? - If you think PowerBuilder is all client/server, think again. PowerBuilder does distributed computing and lets you work in a J2EE environment.
- PB for Application Servers using the new PBVM plugin, enabling you to deploy PB applications with your choice of app server
- PB for Java. The JSF Datawindow will enable your Java developers to use PowerBuilder DataWindows
- PB for .NET. PowerBuilder and DataWindow .NET give you 4GL solutions to .NET development
- PB for Mobility. PocketBuilder enables you to build and deploy a mobile application in less an hour
- PB and the WEB. The WebDataWindow, did you know there is WEB authoring with PB, or Web DataWindow availability to JSP ?
12.45 Lunch
14.00 Discover the world of Lords Cricket Ground – Tour and visit to see the Ashes
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Visual Expert
Perhaps you've already heard of Visual Expert. If not, it's well worth looking at. Basically it's a code analysis and reporting tool for PowerBuilder applications. There are a large number of features in the product, too many to cover in a single blog posting. Today I just want to focus on three that I use extensively.
Dead Code
The tool examines the code and locates functions, attributes, variables, function parameters and event parameters scripts to determine when there are variable declarations that are no longer used. It's very useful if the application is a bit older or has gone through major rework and you're no longer sure what's actually being used.
Unused Components
The Unused Components analysis does for objects in an application what the Dead Code analysis does for code in objects. You have to be a lot more careful with this one though. If the objects are referenced dynamically, the tool has no way of determining the reference. For example, many of the objects reported in this analysis are referenced as a result of data coming from the database (the database contains the object references). Still, it gives you a good start on determining where you should start looking for dead objects.
Development Rules
If your development shop is rigorous about following coding guidelines (mine is), the Development Rules analysis comes in real handy. If I'm working on some major modifications or some large new functionality, I find it all too easy to skip over doing stuff like adding script headers until the code is complete. The problem is, once the code is complete I'm not really sure where I have addressed the guidelines and where I haven't. The Development Rules analysis tells me exactly where I need to revisit.
Dead Code
The tool examines the code and locates functions, attributes, variables, function parameters and event parameters scripts to determine when there are variable declarations that are no longer used. It's very useful if the application is a bit older or has gone through major rework and you're no longer sure what's actually being used.
Unused Components
The Unused Components analysis does for objects in an application what the Dead Code analysis does for code in objects. You have to be a lot more careful with this one though. If the objects are referenced dynamically, the tool has no way of determining the reference. For example, many of the objects reported in this analysis are referenced as a result of data coming from the database (the database contains the object references). Still, it gives you a good start on determining where you should start looking for dead objects.
Development Rules
If your development shop is rigorous about following coding guidelines (mine is), the Development Rules analysis comes in real handy. If I'm working on some major modifications or some large new functionality, I find it all too easy to skip over doing stuff like adding script headers until the code is complete. The problem is, once the code is complete I'm not really sure where I have addressed the guidelines and where I haven't. The Development Rules analysis tells me exactly where I need to revisit.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Latin American PowerBuilder User Group Meeting Followup
Specifically on some PowerDesigner questions that didn't get answered earlier:
Q. We would like to use PowerDesigner, but the cost per seat ($4000 US) is unreasonable when compared to Enterprise Architect ($600).
A. PowerDesigner's features that appeal to the pure UML for the individual developer's increases productivity are indeed quite similar to what you will find in Sparx's product. All the UML diagrams are represented, and the code generation and reverse engineering functions are there. However, PowerDesigner has a few advantages even in this market that are not part of the Sparx feature set - complete loss-less round-trip engineering between model and code, plug-in capability into Eclipse for real-time model to code synchronization and interoperability with all Eclipse-based java tooling, a highly customizable template and script based code generation engine for easy pattern and model-driven development code creation based on your own customized code patterns, and the backing from one of the industry's best design tools development team - Sybase. Beyond the individual, PowerDesigner fosters greater multidisciplinary collaboration by combining the UML solution with the industry's top data modeling solution and some of the easiest to use tools for documenting and maintaining object-relational mapping and persistence code creation. Add to that the possibility up upgrading to the fully integrated design-time repository on the market and further upgrading to the studio adds business modeling and service orchestration design techniques to complete an enterprise-wide modeling and design environment.
Q. Why are the only localizations for PowerDesigner in English and French?
A. PowerDesigner was originally invented in Paris, France and was originally a French Language tool. We are still the most dominant player in the french-speaking world, and because of that history we retain the french User Interface. However, for other localizations, we have yet to meet growing demand to justify the conversion (user interface AND documentation where documentation is a very large part of the process, on-line help, user documentation, and screens all need to be translated, and then integrated into the engineering effort). So - as a result, we retain the PowerAMC brand for French countries for historical and current market condition reasons, and use PowerDesigner, English UI and documentation, for the rest of the world.
Q. We would like to use PowerDesigner, but the cost per seat ($4000 US) is unreasonable when compared to Enterprise Architect ($600).
A. PowerDesigner's features that appeal to the pure UML for the individual developer's increases productivity are indeed quite similar to what you will find in Sparx's product. All the UML diagrams are represented, and the code generation and reverse engineering functions are there. However, PowerDesigner has a few advantages even in this market that are not part of the Sparx feature set - complete loss-less round-trip engineering between model and code, plug-in capability into Eclipse for real-time model to code synchronization and interoperability with all Eclipse-based java tooling, a highly customizable template and script based code generation engine for easy pattern and model-driven development code creation based on your own customized code patterns, and the backing from one of the industry's best design tools development team - Sybase. Beyond the individual, PowerDesigner fosters greater multidisciplinary collaboration by combining the UML solution with the industry's top data modeling solution and some of the easiest to use tools for documenting and maintaining object-relational mapping and persistence code creation. Add to that the possibility up upgrading to the fully integrated design-time repository on the market and further upgrading to the studio adds business modeling and service orchestration design techniques to complete an enterprise-wide modeling and design environment.
Q. Why are the only localizations for PowerDesigner in English and French?
A. PowerDesigner was originally invented in Paris, France and was originally a French Language tool. We are still the most dominant player in the french-speaking world, and because of that history we retain the french User Interface. However, for other localizations, we have yet to meet growing demand to justify the conversion (user interface AND documentation where documentation is a very large part of the process, on-line help, user documentation, and screens all need to be translated, and then integrated into the engineering effort). So - as a result, we retain the PowerAMC brand for French countries for historical and current market condition reasons, and use PowerDesigner, English UI and documentation, for the rest of the world.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
DataWindow.Net wins Readers’ Choice awards
DataWindow.Net took first place in the "Best .NET Libraries and Controls" category in the 2005 .NET Developer’s Journal Readers’ Choice Awards
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Counting lines of code
Need to generate lines of code statistics for your project? For PowerBuilder, you're best served by PBL Peeper or Visual Expert. It's not immediately obvious how to do it with PBL Peeper, but if you go to Lists, then Scripts, and then select View->Show from the menu, you'll be presented with a dialog that allows you to add Line Count to the report.
If you've got to count lines of code for anything else, you might want to check out Code Counter Pro. Somewhat similar to SlickEdit, you define for a particular file extension how to distnguish between code lines and comment lines.
Then for a particular analysis you select the different file extensions that should be analyzed.
If your PowerBuilder project is under source control and you don't have "Delete PowerBuilder generated object files" checked in the source control settings, you could easily run Code Counter Pro on the PowerBuilder source files (they're generated by the source control system in the directory with the PBLs). The issue is that Code Counter Pro will include all of the system generated code lines as well (create and destroy scripts, etc.). Generally that's not the information that people are looking for when they are looking for code line counts for PowerBuilder projects.
If you've got to count lines of code for anything else, you might want to check out Code Counter Pro. Somewhat similar to SlickEdit, you define for a particular file extension how to distnguish between code lines and comment lines.
Then for a particular analysis you select the different file extensions that should be analyzed.
If your PowerBuilder project is under source control and you don't have "Delete PowerBuilder generated object files" checked in the source control settings, you could easily run Code Counter Pro on the PowerBuilder source files (they're generated by the source control system in the directory with the PBLs). The issue is that Code Counter Pro will include all of the system generated code lines as well (create and destroy scripts, etc.). Generally that's not the information that people are looking for when they are looking for code line counts for PowerBuilder projects.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Ovation
Well, perhaps not the greatest name for a product, particular when you decide to use a capital O as the logo in your icon. I can't help think of an egg rather than applause. But what it does is pretty spectacular. If it's not a cure for PowerPoint poisoning, it's a least a treatment.
It takes a PowerPoint presentation, adds moving backgrounds, sharper graphics and better transitions between points. And of interest to presenters, it allows you to see your notes side-by-side with the slides while your audience only sees the slides.
The product is in beta now. The only problem I've had with it is that it requires more serious graphics hardware that my current (couple year old) laptop is equipped with. Looks like it's time for an upgrade.
It takes a PowerPoint presentation, adds moving backgrounds, sharper graphics and better transitions between points. And of interest to presenters, it allows you to see your notes side-by-side with the slides while your audience only sees the slides.
The product is in beta now. The only problem I've had with it is that it requires more serious graphics hardware that my current (couple year old) laptop is equipped with. Looks like it's time for an upgrade.
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