PBDJ Feature Story

Novalys, creator of tools for developers since 1998, is an active part of the PowerBuilder community. We create applications to make development faster and easier. Our clients span the globe. This year, we are proud to announce the addition of two new products to our line-up

Novalys prides itself on responding to the real needs of PowerBuilder developers. If you find yourself in one of the following situations, we have a solution to help you. In an upcoming series of articles, we will develop each situation further.

Application Security
The more passwords a user has to remember, the more likely they are to forget them. And when a user forgets his password, it takes the IT department time to reset it. This can add up quickly, costing your company in lost time and productivity. Also, maintaining a separate list of usernames and passwords for each application is just not practical. We will show how Visual Guard provides a solution to address all of these problems at once.

Perhaps you earn your living off the products you develop. If so, your code is what makes your applications unique and is something you want to protect. Imagine if a competitor reverse-engineered your application with one of the powerful decompilers on the market - your competitive advantage is gone.

Or, perhaps you work in a larger company and are concerned about the possibility that your data and transactions are not safe, as someone with access to the .EXE of an application could reverse-engineer the program and compromise the confidentiality and security of the operations. We will examine how to use PBProtect to protect against these threats.

Application Maintenance
If you need to modify the business rules of your core application, you know how large a process this is. You plan extensive changes in the database and have to rename tables and columns. You will need to spend a lot of time manually searching the impact of the change on the main tables and will have bugs to correct after the change. It's a time-consuming and frustrating process. If you do proper regression testing, it's even longer and can become expensive. We will look at how Visual Expert makes Impact Analysis faster and easier.

Perhaps you have an old PB application that you'd like to change the look and feel of. There are some fields in the application that are not used, and it would be good to remove them.

Or, you may develop large applications and your clients often ask you to customize them. These services are usually sold as a consulting package, but it is time-consuming, and doesn't focus on your core competencies. We will look at how to use Customization Studio to make these changes without disclosing your source code.

You may need to create an application for an international sales force to allow them to print purchase orders in multiple languages, without changing the language of the screen. We will show you how to use Enable to create multi-lingual applications without altering the source code.

In future articles in PowerBuilder Developer's Journal, we will discuss how Novalys has approached each situation and developed a solution.

For more information visit http://www.novalys.net or contact us at info@novalys.net.

Resources

• Visual Expert
• Visual Guard
• Enable
• Customization Studio
• PBProtect