PowerBuilder User Group Germany

Robyn Chan - Senior Vice President - Head of Mobile Platform

Michael Redford - PMP Business Information Technology, Products and Innovation

PowerBuilder 15

• 32 and 64 bit support
• OData
• SQL 2012
• Oracle 12
• Windows 8
• .Net 4.5
• Dockable Windows

Beta builds are ready now, but access to it is still being figured out.

• PB 15+
• Open APIs eg objects like ORCA, IDE infrastructure/painter, build process
• Hana XSE support for PowerScript ( XSE is their JavaScript like app server language)
• HANA Cloud (HEC, Neo AWS) and on premise options
• Evaluating
• RDL (River Definition Language) support for PowerScript (intermediate layer, platform agnostic)
• WebApp Toolkit for multi-channel development (internal name - not announced yet, web based IDE, AppDesigner, AppBuilder, the latter was developed by the PowerBuilder team to create mobile apps, SAP UI5 -- HTML5)
• Client SDKs for NVOs - Typical PB app is 30% business logic in the client.  The audience thought it was a lot higher.

PowerBuilder.Net versus PowerBuilder Client

• Looking at trying to get into one IDE

Plan to support JavaScript in IDE

• Yes, that was what support for XSE was intended to convey

EAServer - what happened to NetWeaver integration

• Couldn't put on slide - Looking at migrating PASP to Netweaver - probably wouldn't focus on other app servers

What about support contracts

• That's one of the big questions they're working on.   The other is that existing SAP customers have an S-user account.  They're trying to figure out how to automatically give people S-user accounts so they can access the beta without going through the S-user creation process.

Haiti Missions Trip 2013

Friday, November 1st

Our flight doesn't leave until 9:30 PM or so, so we figure we'll leave at about 4:30 PM, giving us more than enough time to get to LAX by 6:30 PM, the 3 hour before flight time that American Airlines wants us there.  Of course, about 9AM we start hearing about the shooting at LAX.  For a while the airport is closed.  The airport opens a few hours later, but all of the roads leading into it are still closed.  People landing at LAX have to walk a couple of miles outside of the facility to get picked up, and people coming in have to walk in from several miles out.

Flight delays on return from Haiti

We were supposed to leave Port-au-Prince at 5:15PM on 11/9 and catch a 9:05 PM flight in Miami back to LAX getting in at just before midnight.

The plane that we were supposed to be taking out of Haiti arrived late, and we ended up missing our connection in Miami as we didn't arrive until 8:15.  That's touch down, it takes a while to the terminal and then get through customs.  I have Global Entry, so I largely skipped the customs part.  But the airline had switched the luggage tags on mine and Mark's luggage and I had everybody's luggage tags on me, so I ended up waiting for him and Luis anyway at baggage claim.

Finally, something that might kill PowerPoint

It's the one use of HTML5 that I've actually found some purpose for.

http://fayetteadvocate.com/archives/11511/2013/10/15/bunkr-unveils-new-major-version-of-its-powerpoint-killer/

Some technology that might actually make web applications as complex and responsive as Silverlight or Flash

They bypass the browser's renderer.  It's in beta now.  It's supposed to operate without plugins on all browsers, although they haven't announced support for Internet Explorer yet.

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-10-2013/131015-reinventing-the-web.html?page=1

Well, I got one thing right anyway...

I commented in a PBDJ article a while back that:

That's when I had an epiphany. Windows 8 might actually make sense. It runs on both ARM and x86 processors. It has desktop and Metro (mobile) modes. It includes virtualization. Perhaps Microsoft is thinking ahead to a time when we don't need an operating system that can deploy to different devices, but an operating system that can deploy to a single device that has a number of different form factors.

Microsoft recently confirmed that is something that they are trying to accomplish.  Not specifically with Windows 8, but Windows 8 does seem to be a step in that direction.

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.