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PowerBuilder to Flex - a Natural Transition

« H E Yakov Fain :: email
posted Friday, 23 June 2006
Yesterday, I met yet another  Java developer, and  all of a sudden, he’s   mentioned PowerBuilder.  That very second, the conversation became a lot more warmer:
 
“Remember datawindows? ”
“It was and still is the best RAD tool. No any other technology  could beat it.”
“Forget about it!  Nested reports,  non-visual objects…”
“Is there any bar close by? Let’s have a drink”

There is some kind of unofficial brother/sisterhood of people related to PowerBuilder. In the 90th,   I spent five years programming in PB. This was the best RAD tool for business developers. I switched to Java in ‘98, but did not lose connections with PB developers  : my wife is still doing PB for the last 10 years and I see this DataWindow painter once in a while on her laptop.  PB now enjoys a steady double-digit version numbers: Sybase found it much easier to conquer  double-digits in versioning  than in their financial charts.

More and more industry professionals are into development of full-featured   rich desktop-like applications delivered over the Web. While some PowerBuilder developers will remain faithful to their old-fashioned but  bread-winning software,  a large portion of the PB camp should be looking for an easy transition  to another software. In my opinion, such software has arrived Adobe (formerly Macromedia) and it’s called Flex 2.
PB developers will find themselves at home in this solid environment offering an impressive  library of  GUI components for the fat but fast clients, so-familiar event-driven programming, drag-and-drop screen design,  good IDE, debugger, integration with Java on the server, charting, etc. You create your applications  using XML-based declarative language and object-oriented ActionScript 3. The compiled source code is  runs under popular Flash player, which is a virtual machine available on literally every platform.

The learning curve for PB developers is not steep at all. You’ll feel yourself at home there. You can find a plethora of training materials about this technology at adobe’s Web site  (watch a couple of presentation videos there), the closest upcoming seminars on Flex will take place in New York City  in August,  Max 2006 in Las Vegas will have a Flex track  AJAX conference in Santa Clara, CA in October   will have a Flex track.

Later this year, I’m planning to run a couple of  Flex 2 training classes in New York City for Java and PowerBuilder enterprise developers.  Let me known in advance, if interested: enrollment will be limited. Typical questions  I get after such announcements are: 
1.    “Will I find a job using this great tool?”.
And here’s my typical answer, “I am not a con artist  to guarantee employment, this is America! But I do believe that 2007 will be a year of Flex”. 
2.    “Are there any books to read on Flex?”. 
Adobe has plenty of introductory materials and full documentation online,  a book on ActionScript 3.0 is coming up in September   and I’m also working with  two of my friends on the advanced book on Flex .

I’m sure my former PowerBuilder students got the message. See you soon, guys

Yours truly,
Yakov Fain

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comments (7)


1. James Mills left...
Friday, 23 June 2006 7:46 pm

Is Adobe paying Yakov Fain for evangalizing this crap:-)? Having been burned by Flex, I think this blog is fairly biased and don't understand the landscape. There are plenty of solutions for moving PowerBuilder to something else (Visual Studio.NET is a great solution, for example). If you were going to pick the top three technologies for writing applications, it is going to be Ajax, .NET (Vista/WPE/XAML stuff) and Java. Definitely not Flex today and it will not be Flex tomorrow either. Yes, Adobe is a big company and can pay cash to buy some people/mindshare, but it is not anywhere and will never be anywhere as big as microsoft, the entire Java community (J2SE, SWT, Eclipse, J2ME, etc) and the entire Ajax community. The world will probably go Flex if and only if Microsoft, Java community and Ajax community all failed. -Doesn't look like likely.


2. Michael Glazer left...
Friday, 23 June 2006 11:18 pm

I think Adobe is paying Yakov as well as Sun paid him for evangelizing Java back in 1997 :-) At that time Yakov, if I'm not mistaken programmed in PB and C++. But back than, in 97, he saw Tiger, Mustang, AJAX, etc. Hmm, I think he had a pretty good vision. In regards to Flex; As VisualStudio.NET, SWT, J2ME and other technologies, on my opinion, Flex has every right to exist and to grow.I just started to use it, by the way on Eclipse, and as a Java developer since 98 I think it has one bright future ahead. I think it's a great stuff.


3. Yakov left...
Saturday, 24 June 2006 2:07 am

James,

1. No, Adobe does not pay me. I do not think they pay Bruce Eckel either, but he has included a chapter on creation GUI with Flex in the latest edition of his bestseller Thinking in Java. 2. Most likely you've been burned by Flex1.5. I'm into Flex 2. 3. Adobe does not have to be as big as Microsoft to succeed 4. Adobe is far ahead of MS XAML/WPE 5. AJAX is fine for consumer applications, but is a sand castle when it comes to enterprise development


4. Damon Cooper left...
Sunday, 25 June 2006 4:31 pm :: http://www.dcooper.org

Couldn't agree more. I'm an ex-Powersoft/Sybase employee, and I can tell you I'm more excited about Flex 2 and ColdFusion and what this combo will do for Rich Internmet App productivity than I have been for a long, long time.

Check out the RAD Flex 2/CF App generation Wizard here: http://www.dcooper.org for a quick peek of things to come....

Damon


5. Jason Jones left...
Sunday, 18 February 2007 5:16 am

If I were running a PowerBuilder shop today (Feb 2007), I’d shoot myself in the foot, stomach, and head in that order. I might even entertain the thought of setting my hair on fire first. Perhaps the DotNetified version PowerBuilder 11 will provide a path to salvation for those stuck with a technology that is has no future. Whatever happened to Office Notes … that’s the question you might ask of PowerBuilder two years hence? WPF/XAML and Flex/MXML are it for the foreseeable future. In the short to mid term, Flex/MXML will do very well indeed.

On a positive note, since most corporations are just now starting to transition into the 21st century, you might be able to eek out another two to three years out of PowerBuilder before even your customers figure out its the path to oblivion.


6. Henry Lacks left...
Sunday, 18 February 2007 5:33 am

If I were stuck with developing in PowerBuilder today, I’d have to assume I somehow wound up in purgatory. With every mouse click, I would pray for divine intervention, so that I might escape from the land of the lost.


7. Jesus Alcocer left...
Thursday, 2 August 2007 7:00 pm

Well right now I am in a crossroad, I developed a enterprise application with powerbuilder on the front-end, for the back-end instead I am managing ASE Sybase, Oracle and MySQL, but it was a pain in the ass changing the code in every aspect of the front-end application to be fully operable with those three databases. Now it is time to move forward and change the front-end... but the big question is... Which programming language should I choose if I dont want anybody to get intrusions on my propietary code??? Java? Microsot .NET stuff? Borland? .... HELP!!!!