It may be a bit early, but I have a New Year's resolution I'd like to propose to Sybase: 'No more 80% solutions.' What is an 80% solution? It's a technology approach that seems well conceived and when used with small demonstration applications (e.g., beta testing) works well.

AJAX frameworks - says former Ascential VP of Technology and Product Management Bob Zurek, now with IBM (who acquired Ascential) - currently lack a killer component like the DataWindow. Developers spend way to much time dealing with all the complexities that are easily handled by a com...

In the past decade, the software industry has evolved significantly, especially in the enterprise application development area. And the biggest evolution has been the transition from client/server applications to Web based applications.

Six years ago I was asked to implement a data repository to hold network management and performance data. With monitoring systems, databases have a tendency to be large, and have a delicate balance between inserting (logging) new data and deleting old (aging) data out from the system. ...

At Techwave 2005 in Las Vegas, ISUG unveiled its entirely redesigned Web site (see Figure 1) and showcased some new functionality. A good deal of this new functionality is related to the enhancements process, the voice between the Sybase user community and Sybase product management. IS...

We begin this article by asking the question, why would you want to add caller ID to your PowerBuilder applications anyway? I can think of about a handful of applications for it, mostly revolving around picking a phone number and querying a database. For example, 'Good morning, Chance,...

Sybase WorkSpace is the first integrated development environment (IDE) capable of delivering all of theapplicationtypes in demand today - whether services-oriented, mobile, Java-based, composite, event-driven, or data-driven. Sybase WorkSpace is built on the Eclipse Open Source framew...

It took me a while to mull over what I thought about the conference, but the following is my take on it. This year at TechWave the Game Show was held during the reception, where food and drink were served. In a similar mode, many of the meals were served in the exhibit hall. As I menti...

Due to new government mandates and the consolidation of departments, the State of Michigan's Office of Financial and Insurance Services (OFIS) confronted the challenge of custom building, or buying, a new IT infrastructure. Either option would require the investment of millions of doll...

Last week, our development team was supposed to launch a new version of our application. As usual, right before finishing the application we discover that one or two problems had to be corrected.

Every now and then we create reusable components, and so far we are giving them away for free. Some pathetic bloggers call this 'giving back to the community'. We look at it simple: if we do not have time to productionize the component, we donate it.

A session-based synchronization technology designed to synchronize UltraLite and Adaptive Server Anywhere databases with many industry-standard SQL database management systems from Sybase and other vendors. We use it to synchronize data from one or more bookstores to a consolidated dat...

This article describes the architecture and features of the Web application development tooling in WorkSpace 1.5, how to develop these powerful JSF DataWindow components, and then use them in a JSF Web application, as well as how to integrate Web applications into a Service Oriented Ar...

Yes, Virginia, Sybase does have a J2EE-compatible application server, and it's known as EAS, short for Enterprise Application Server. In fact, EAS is alive and well, and this issue of the PowerBuilder Developer's Journal will focus on the recent release of version 6.0.

This article describes the synergies between PowerBuilder and Sybase WorkSpace for services-oriented development and shows how to use a PowerBuilder component in Sybase WorkSpace 1.5.

I went to TechWave a bit early because TeamSybase was holding their reception on Saturday evening. At the reception TeamSybase initiated several new members. If you'd like to view some of the video from the super-secret initiation ceremony, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq0VbTrjld8

We discovered PowerGen when we were looking for a command line utility for importing objects into PowerBuilder. At the time (PowerBuilder V5.0) we were struggling with a source control system whose SCC-API interface was having all kinds of trouble with PowerBuilder (as most source cont...

Ten years ago I've been doing PowerBuilder and my mentality was different: first, I was the best friend of business users, and second I did not really worry about what's under the hood. I could do stuff quickly, or using the modern jargon, I was an

SYS-CON Events (www.events.sys-con.com) announced today that the first international 'AJAXWorld(TM) Conference & Expo' (www.ajaxworldexpo.com), taking place on October 3-4, 2006, at theSanta Clara Convention Center, California, will offer AJAXWorld University - Developer Bootcamp progr...

When we talk about AJAX and its huge impact on Web development, one important thing to mention is that it's not a ready-to-ship component that you just plug into your app and now you're Web 2.0. In fact, what AJAX can do for you is to provide a simple, yet powerful way to make transpar...

Great news today .. Sybase's subsidiary in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada - iAnywhere Solutions has announced the release of the new SQL Anywhere database version 10 into production! Sybase has decided to rename the ASA (Adaptive Server Anywhere) database back to its original name SQL Anywh...

Let's suppose that you have a search window where a user can enter a search string and get the list of text items matching this pattern. Ideally, the portions of text that meet the search criteria should be highlighted, for example, by text formatting.

My presentation at TechWave 2006 is intended for the beginner or the moderately experienced PowerBuilder developer. I hope to share some of the useful tips and tricks I have picked up in my 12 years as a PowerBuilder developer.

I used to implement SMTP for PowerBuilder using a PBNI class that used P.J. Naughter's CPJNSMTPConnection MFC class to do the heavy lifting. Well, .NET 2.0 changes all that. One of the new features of .NET 2.0 is the introduction of a SMTPClient class. One of the features of .NET since...

PowerBuilder offers some dynamic querying capabilities. For simple scenarios it works quite well. But what if your scenario isn't simple? What if you wanted to write a database-querying tool that provides stored procedure compilation, ShowPlan display, or the execution of large complic...

At Nielsen Media Research (NMR), the Core Business Architecture group recently completed a project to evaluate where systems support business processes poorly or not at all. Our first challenge was to determine the format to use in capturing the information.

Welcome to TechWave 2006! The structure of the conference has changed significantly this year. The two- and four-day a.m. education courses are gone, at least in that format. This year what were the two-day classes are given in a single five-hour session on either Monday or Tuesday aft...

I was originally planning on attending the .Net Interop in PB11 class. However, due to a bit of a snafu Sybase thought I was an employee and scheduled me to proctor the New Features in PB 10.5 / 11.0 class. It was actually quite encouraging to know that the class was held twice (once p...

John Chen thanked ISUG and TeamSybase for being here. He then thanked the event sponsors. He noted that keynote was being webcast live and made disclaimers. He also noted that board of directors are attending the event and meeting the customers.

I'm here a bit early because TeamSybase has their own reception Saturday evening. According to the Newswave, there are 1,600 attendees this year. Here?s a picture of the logo welcoming everyone to Techwave. That backpack in front of it is the one you get when you register. ISUG had a d...

This online web application is huge and belongs to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)! It has been running for the past 5 years and as of late, has had major upgrades and features added. This latest release has been built using Sybase's application ...

Monday's keynote speakers included Sybase Chairman, CEO, and President John Chen and Sybase iAnywhere President Terry Stepien.

'In today's world, it's time-consuming for IT administrators to go through the steps of setting up secure testing scenarios for software evaluation,' said Joe Owen, vice president engineering, Sybase iAnywhere.

We've all had days when QA made things difficult. When we take a closer look at what caused it we usually find that there was some miscommunication between QA and the programmers. And this miscommunication was most likely caused by the business having unrealistic expectations of the de...

PowerBuilder Developer Resources released PBDelta version 5.2.0. This new version includes PowerBuilder 10.5 support including new icons and menus.

EAServer 6.0 brings with it many new and exciting changes on a number of fronts, not the least of which is its management console, EAServer Manager. Many of the changes wrought in the console are simple byproducts of the changes in the underlying server, so I won't delve into them. In...

In this paper we'll be discussing the migration of existing EAServer applications to EAServer 6. Because of architecture changes in EAServer, an explicit migration is needed; whereas with previous versions you could simply upgrade an existing installation or install and sync the entiti...

The Texas Workforce Commission, a state agency that oversees workforce development programs, needed to overhaul its popular client/server application to keep up with growth in size and functionality. Using Sybase technology, it was able to re-architect and re-implement the application,...

According to the programmers' guide provided with EAS (5.x), a Web application is a unit of deployment for interrelated Web content, JavaServer Pages (JSPs), and Java servlets. Generally, a Web application developer under EAS must create JSP files and/or Java servlets. Sometimes, howev...

Enable, a framework-level tool that makes PowerBuilder applications multilingual, has announced version 1.5 with enhanced performance in terms of speed and the handling of special cases, and a full treatment of 'right to left' languages.