Powerbuilder is an IDE, an integrated Development Environment, a tool where a programmer do everything within it, including design and develop screens/reports, write command line programs, compile, deploy applications all from within Powerbuilder.
This is in contrast to programming in languages like C or Pascal, where you use a text editor to edit, a compiler to compile and copy files to deploy.
IDE's and case tools were popular in early 90's. There were several such tools that promised "less or no coding" and yet develop and deploy enterprise applications. Powerbuilder was one of many tools available. I remember reviewing PB, Visual Basic (VB), Gupta SQL windows and Oracle CDE (successor to SQL forms in windows). Of all these, I took to PB easily, I liked SQL windows better (I remember it was more colorful and windowy!). Oracle CDE (forms 4.0) didn't measure up. And Visual Basic needed more programming. I remember the days when VB and PB were constantly compared and contrasted. Each had it's own strength but PB won in some of the corporate contracts. The datawindow, and the quick reporting capability were probably some of the secret.
Contrary to popular belief, it's not a tool for non-programmers - managers, Business Analysts and the like. Yes, several tried, but any serious screens in PB always needed programming. To this day, I hear people brushing it as a child's play in the world of complex Java and .Net applications. But PB is used, surprisingly, in building big corporate applications, even today. And such serious development activities always involve programming. Programming in a language called Powerscript. It's basic with a twist. Long before Java became so popular, it took some tenets of C++ and became Object oriented. (OO pundits may not agree and call it more Object based than object oriented, but that's a topic for another post!). Oh, about PB for managers, Sybase made another tool called Info-maker, a trimmed down version of PB, which didn't require programming (or lacking programming, depending on who looks at it).
PB is definitely easier to use to build screens and rudimentary database applications. I feel, the user interface is definitely easier to use than that of VB, but then I've been using it for many years. The strength of Powerbuilder, as against other tools was and has been the datawindows, a compiled widget readily available to include in any windows. Strictly speaking, a datawindow is a window that may have many controls on it, but the difference is that a datawindow is managed by PB routines as against windows API. For this reason, Sybase always suggests to combine many different controls in a window into a single datawindow, wherever possible, for performance.
A datawindow widget is not much unlike ADO or DAO objects in VB. The strength of the datawindow is that it's built around SQL (what's called a datasource - there are other data sources, more later) and by keeping the SQL in PB itself and database neutral, we could make the same datawindow work with many different databases, like Oracle, Sybase, Informix etc.
PB has changed a lot over the years. People who have seen it in the 90's will definitely realize the transformation. The IDE itself started packing more in version 7.0. Now, in version 10.x and beyond, it's turned into a true development tool. (Rumor has it that PB 12.0 could actually be used as an IDE for .Net development!). The question still remains, in the world of Eclipse and Netbeans, Java and .net, why PB? That too enterprise edition costs a bundle when Java is all free. This blogger aims to ask some of those questions and try to find answers live on this blog.
Currently I am working at the City of LA where we use Powerbuilder heavily in a clustered EA Server environment. We even have extensions on the web using JSP and Coldfusion. The software is a tax software used by thousands of businesses in and around LA. This is no child's play. EA Server is to Powerbuilder like weblogic to Java. It's an application container that can run PB objects and Java objects alike and it uses CORBA (how much it reminds me of Forte UDS!).
From the simple client/server tool, PB has reinvented itself several times to become a n-tier platform here. Earlier PB turned out a non-visual object (NVO) that proved vital to this n-tier platform. An utterly client widget, datawindow, gave birth to (non-visual) datastores that eventually helped them to be n-tier objects as well.
But then again, I feel, Sybase lost several opportunities to build it up and market it as the greatest tool on earth (I don't mean exactly that, but at least the ads should say it, right?). They are constantly toying with the ideas and drop them like a fly. Most recently, the EA framework, built by Cynergy Systems for Sybase, that can be used to build Enterprise applications in PB/EA Server environment has been discontinued. EA Server itself is dangling. You hear about PBNI, PB ORCA, I've used them too, but their future is always questionable. In the world, where every version of a software gets better with time, some of these tools inside PB appear and disappear. With PB becoming an IDE to .net, their neutrality to languages may be disappearing. And finally, with SAP buying Sybase recently, the whole existence of PB as a tool may be in jeopardy. (You think this is not possible, think what happened to Forte UDS. Sun bought this company only to kill the software, as it was a competition to Java J2EE at the time. How did they do it? They created a lousy tool called Forte for Java to erase the name Forte and eventually pulled the plug on many websites that talked about the old Forte).
We will go on a journey here in this blog, where I will not only share my experiences with the tool, but also technical articles, how-tos about PB.
