A petition update and a new petition....

It's two weeks until SAP TechEd Las Vegas, and we've ready 1,891 signatures on the petition for SAP to take some action with regard to PowerBuilder.  That means we need 109 more to reach our goal by the beginning of TechEd.

Meanwhile, a number of people have expressed some concerns with one or both features of the current petition:

1.  That causes.com seems to require a Facebook account in order to sign the petition, and people don't want to create a Facebook account or link their existing one with the petition.

2.  That some of the proposed actions (i.e., sell the product or release it to open source) were more extreme than they felt comfortable signing onto.  Instead, they just wanted to urge SAP to proceed with the release of PowerBuilder 15 that everybody has been waiting for.

As a result of that feedback, I've created a second petition on change.org, one that does not require a Facebook account and which only urges the release of PowerBuilder 15.  I've also received translations of the text of the petition in German, Spanish and Japanese.  There is also a Hebrew translation in the works, but for now I've included a Google Translation generated version.  I'll replace that with the human generated version as soon as it's available.

You can access the new petition at change.org.  Please pass it along to those you know who haven't signed the first petition for some reason.

And this is from the guys whose decision to support HTML5 doomed Flex and Silverlight?

Bad news: iOS 7's HTML5 is full of bugs
http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/bad-news-ios-7s-html5-full-of-bugs-227685

No news is NOT good news....

Great post from Displaced Guy on the status, or lack thereof, of PB15.    A few items worth calling to attention and commenting on.

"I REALLY feel bad for Sue Dunnell, Bruce Armstrong and others at SAP who have an genuine interest in PowerBuilder and are class-act individuals but SAP is playing them like a violin like they are to us.  My displeasure with SAP is in no way directed towards any employee of SAP other than those who are responsible for the decisions at a very high level."

Perhaps it's just me, put the first sentence in this quote could imply that I work for SAP.  It references Sue Dunnel (who works for SAP), myself and "others at SAP".  They may be playing me like a violin, but I don't work for SAP.

"The reality is that to this day there really isn’t a perfect replacement for PowerBuilder and it is too bad that SAP doesn’t see this.  Moving a large complex PB application to any of the competing technologies is no trivial task and has proven to be extremely difficult and expensive with many failures (projects canned because they made no progress) when going to both .NET and Java.  The remaining legacy PB applications would cost millions to redevelop. There are some really huge, robust and mission critical legacy PB applications in the corporate world, one that comes to mind was developed by Perot Systems many years ago and is still used by many health care companies.  It would take years to redevelop at a cost in the millions.  The amount of time needed to redevelop in something like .NET would be much longer than the original application took.  Why are legacy PB applications so difficult to redevelop. One obvious answer is the datawindow or lack of a datawindow replacement which is what made PB one of the most capable tools for developing business applications."

Great points, the real crux of the problem, and the best summary of the situation I've seen to date.

"We are set to surpass rates of $100/hr (to the developer) as early as 2014 at the current pace, for a senior developer."

Well, they say ever cloud has a silver lining.  When I'm wearing my "somebody that has to find and hire PowerBuilder developers" hat this would be bad news.  But when I'm wearing my own "PowerBuilder developer" hat, it sounds pretty good to me.  ;-)

Update on the petition to SAP regarding #PowerBuilder

The petition for SAP to do something positive with regard to PowerBuilder is doing well.   We've just passed 1,500 signatures, which was the latest goal.  I've revised the goal to 2,000 signatures and changed the goal deadline to October 21st.  That's the first day of SAP TechEd in Las Vegas.  It is our intent to meet with SAP management at that event and provide them with the signed petition as well as additional information we believe may be able to convince SAP to take more interest in the product.

If you are a PowerBuilder developer and you haven't signed the petition yet, please do so and pass the information along to other PowerBuilder developers you may know that may not know about it.  You do not need a Facebook account to sign the petition.  Instead, you can create a causes.com account directly at:   https://www.causes.com/signup

Using the Google Geocoding API from PowerBuilder.Net

I'm running a petition on causes.com, and I wanted to do some geographic analysis of the results.  Causes.com gives me information about the signers with regard to their name, email address, country and zip code.  The country information was useful for doing the first phase of the analysis, which I wrote about in the Lumira space.  However, I wanted to do a bit more fine grained analysis, and that means I needed to convert that zip code information into something more directly useful (e.g., city, county and state for the United States).  There's 1500 data points though, so I need an automated method.  Google Geogoding API to the rescue.

How to compile and deploy a PowerBuilder Win32 application

The lastest video I provided for the SAP Database and Technology Academy.

I use the sample application (pbtutor) that comes with PowerBuilder for the demonstration.  I'm also using the PBR Builder utility that was shipped with PowerBuilder 5 and is available from Sybase's CodeXchange.  Note that I had to update it though, as PowerBuilder 5 used the PB.INI file to store information about targets and PowerBuilder 12.5 uses the repository.  The updated version of the utility is available from by PowerBuilder Samples folder on Google Drive.

Help convince SAP to take some positive action with regard toPowerBuilder

I've created a petition on causes.com for SAP to take some positive action with regard to PowerBuilder. I'ld like to invite you to sign that petition.