Elevate 2017

Summary

Given that this was the first conference that Appeon had hosted, I thought it went extremely well.  There were a few areas for improvement, which I'll address at the end of this article.  Attendance was good and diverse.  It seemed like there were a significant number of people attending from outside of the United States.   (Appeon later indicated that 24% of the attendees were from outside North America, 4% from Asia, and 10% each from Europe and Latin America).  There was a lot of energy and excitement on the attendees part, and the sessions overall appeared to have been high quality and well attended.  The facilities were great, if a bit small, and the services provided by Appeon to facilitate travel between the downtown hotels and the conference location were a great touch.  If you didn't attend this year I would highly recommend it next year, particularly given we should have some exciting new 2018 features to see next year.

Spell checking in the new PowerBuilder 2017 Rich Text Edit Control

The original Rich Text Editing control shipped with PowerBuilder was based on an OEM of a popular third party control at the time called HighEdit. By the time 10.5 came out though, that control was quite dated and no longer supported by the vendor. As a result, in 2006 Sybase replaced that control with an OEM of another popular third party control called TX Text Control. There are licensing issues with that control though.  So with the release of PowerBuilder 2017 Appeon updated the control again, replacing the OEM of the TX Text Control with an OEM of the TE Edit Control.

The return of browser plugins?

Apparently there is a W3C open standard currently in development called WebAssembly that is "a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment" for browsers (and non web use).  The binary formatted code in WebAssembly deployment can be parsed up to 20 times faster than JavaScript can be parsed.  While the working group has been focused on providing support for C/C++ a project called Blazor has been developed that provides support for C#.

InfoQ article

Continuous Integration with PowerBuilder 2017, Bonobo Git and Jenkins

In a previous blog post I examined how we could use the Git MSSCCI provider from PB Software in order to use GitHub as a source code provider for PowerBuilder.

In this blog post we're going to take that to the next step, in that we're going to create a build machine separate from our PowerBuilder development machine and then set it up to perform continuous integration.

PowerGen 9.5 for PowerBuilder released

In addition to support for PowerBuilder 2017, the new version offers support for EAS builds, better handling of extended characters in object names and other new features and bug fixes.  For more information, see the release notes.

Configuring PowerBuilder projects to use GitHub for source control

Back in 2003, Sybase introduced CodeXchange, an online forum that allowed developers to share code samples and collaborate on open source projects.  Unfortunately, in 2009 Sybase decided to shut down that system.  The PowerBuilder code samples that had been uploaded tp CodeExchange did eventually show up again in a CodeXchange section of the PowerBuilder wiki on SAP's SCN.  Appeon also obtained permission from many of the authors to post those same PowerBuilder samples on the Code Samples section of the Appeon site.

Hands-on Look at PowerBuilder 2017 Webinar

Hands-on Look at PowerBuilder 2017 Webinar
Friday, June 30th, 2017
9AM to 10AM PDT

A recording of the webcast is now available at:

https://www.appeon.com/developers/library/videos/hands-look-powerbuilder-2017.html