Powerbuilder 6.5 Download
Ena Baccari
People have been saying for 25 years PB is going to die and it has survived because of this tiny leftover group doing just maintenance projects. This tiny group of passionate PB developers are going to retire in a few years from now - for sure. Maybe companies will find replacements with difficulty and paying even more (due to shortage of skilled PB developers) but those new hires will be more or less in the same age group who are about to retire in a couple of years too. It is like prolonging a patient's life with medications with no permanent cure but only imminent death with painful side-effects. Sure, PowerBuilder apps can last 100+ years but who is going to be there around to support PB apps - even a few years from now (leave alone 100+ years)? On the other hand, futuristic languages that were born to live in the cloud such as Java, C# will be around for much longer than 100 years with a vibrant and ACTIVE developer community still around to support them. PB may not have died in 25 years but just one generation change of PB developers and PB's death is imminent. There will be a dire attrition of PB developers soon - it is just a matter of time. Appeon's profits will prolly go down resulting in increase in license subscription fees. I don't know of any other technology that has this weird/bizarre situation.
1) Offer a free Community version of PowerBuilder (it's a shame there is still none so far for all its powerful, rapid development and cost-effective features). Virtually, every other technology has free community editions of their software except PB. What will Appeon lose by offering a limited free version of PB? A free version will only gain more traction and add more to their bottom-line. Who is going to "buy" PB spending $$ these gloomy days of PB - and also learn it these days? Why would anyone do it?? There are less than 2 PowerBuilder jobs in the whole of USA and this has been same the pathetic situation for years now! The addition of killer features like PowerClient, PowerServer, SnapDevelop, PowerScript Migrator, integration with C# and .NET, Themes, Ribbon Bar, etc. have not changed its situation in the job market at all - not one bit - which is proof enough that employers are not interested in PB anymore (and obviously nobody is interested in learning PB newly). Companies and developers who left PB for good decades ago ain't coming back! We cannot ride on a boat that relies only on jobs "maintaining" existing legacy apps.
2) Bring back the Certifications. Every other technology has certifications except PB. There used to be Certified PowerBuilder Developer (CPD)'s from Powersoft and Sybase decades ago (when PowerBuilder was RULING the market and heck, there even used to be a pbjobs.com job board too exclusively for PB jobs) but not anymore - they were gone a long time ago! Grab the course materials from Sybase, update and add more to it, collaborate with universities like Western Governors University and others, offer PowerBuilder as a course track in addition to the C# and Java tracks they already have in Software Development degree programs. WGU is a huge online-only university churning out thousands of students every year, unlike traditional offline universities that can only churn out in dozens maybe. We can only imagine the amount of exposure PB can get from such strategic partnerships.
You could offer separate course tracks as Intro-level with PowerBuilder, PowerClient during year 1 and Advanced-level with PFC, PowerServer, SnapDevelop, PowerScript Migrator, C#, etc. during year 2. There is so much that can be done to safeguard PB's future before it is too late -
Unless PB is offered as a free Community edition and introduced at the University levels exposing students (future developers) to it, there is not much scope for PB's future and no amount of life-support could save it (I had to select "Critical" as the Priority for this topic to emphasize the importance of this matter). Currently, only Java, C#, C++, Python and JavaScript are offered at colleges/universities and these languages are flourishing for a reason! How can Appeon expect a positive outcome by not doing what others are doing?
I've been doing PB for 29 years. I've worked in almost every industry, used almost every database, and worked on applications and teams of all sizes. I've worked on two-tier, three-tier, and even four-tier applications.
It's been my experience during that time that in almost every instance of a poorly designed application that the Client/Customer/Company/Military Organization *BLAMED THE SOFTWARE* instead of the people responsible for creating/maintaining.
My current organization, going back over 20 years, often used poor development ( NO TESTING, NO CODING STANDARDS ) and training ( force-fitting people with minimal training ) practices. That's what created the worst applications I've ever worked on.
One of the most common practices I've seen in my career is designing/building applications that don't completely function correctly and still ended up in production. To make matters worse, they would continue to migrate the application forward without fixing the issue because they thought it was a problem with the development software. Broken components - windows, datawindows, etc. - would continue to fail. Therefore, it was a "PowerBuilder" problem.
I inherited an application at one company where they had multiple broken windows and menus in the production applications. This has been a very common occurrence during my time as a contractor/PB developer.
I've long stood up for the defense of PowerBuilder, much to no avail. Especially since it was easy to shout down the extremely small minority ( it's been very common for me to be the ONLY developer working PB on a 25-40 man teams ). But I've even provided examples and challenges to coworkers and was never defeated. PowerBuilder's ability to be dynamic, easy to use, and flexible is superior. The highlight was when I challenged the Java team one year - It wasn't even close - took them 4 times as long to do something very simple.
But as long as companies and corporations continue to scream loudly about everything PowerBuilder lacks ( because they're not willing to see all the major improvements and upgrades over the last 10+ years ), it will continue to be a very steep, uphill battle. The industry will continue to take the "see no evil, hear no evil" approach, yet continue to speak evil due to a failure of willingness to listen and learn.
I'm about to retire and hand over the PB source code to my clients. They are going to struggle to find a PB developer to support them going forward. I thought that I would use the migration tool to convert to .NET and give them that source...
1. PB documentation, best practices even samples are almost in same condition as before. That is shame, because after those years there is not where to learn, how to develop modern app in PB. I'm not talking about PB Server, because my interest is modern dektop app with DB behind it. I'm not talking about UI. Our customers are satisfied with "old" look and feel and they do not want UI as M$Office has nor webapp. They have quiet large forms in old PB app and they like it. I'm talking about modern design principles, separation of coserns, .... unit testing, .... Our old app is mess of hard to maintain code and this cannot attract any young dev.
2. I had few problems which I remember I had in past and forgot it. I looked for solution, hours, hours (some troubles was with using datastore instead of datawindows for data manipulation, sometimes helped export/import object and it fixed issue, ....., last problem was with function with more prototypes with differen number of arguments, did not work, export object sort prototypes from few to more parameters, import back and issue solved) Those types of werid behaviors are extremely bad. In C# if something does not work, you can debug, find, repair, .. In PB most problems are magic in the end.
3. PB does good what did good 10years ago, you can rapidly create new database intensive app, that is for sure. But without propper coding in few years it become nightmare and here can help some example app with best practices. Which will make easier to maintain or modernize applications.
So I thing that it is possible to make PB more attractive, but it will be a lot of work on doc, tutorials, examples to let people know that in PB you can make app with modern design principles (not only semi templated UI). Learn pepople how to Unit test PB aplications. Problem is that it is not clear if it success after all. World has changed and rapid UI development is not so sexy as it was 15 years ago. Databases are different, not all are relational databases.
I've been using PB for almost 30 years... yikes! Can't believe I'm that old already! My initial investment was PowerSoft's version 3. I agree that PB apps are extremely bullet-proof. I asked my customers years ago if there was another app on their PC's that are as old as my app? Nope.
Corporations are very short-sighted... extremely short-sighted. PB applications have a longer life span than everything I'm aware of. Return On Investment (ROI) is tremendous for PB app development. But they're all attracted to the newest gadgets. And, they all want young, cheap developers who "know everything"... lol! I wonder if they ever do an ROI on the failed projects they've funded?
Appeon has been a blessing to the future of PowerBuilder, and the community support is world-class. I used PB5 for many years (10+)... didn't upgrade until PB12 (Sybase). So the new annual license renewal is more expensive for me, but I understand Appeon has to earn a living too, and I'm guessing a lot of us didn't upgrade very often (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). I do love the fact that even though I do have to renew my subscription every year, I don't have to upgrade my software. But it's available if I need it.
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