First PowerBuilder 12 public beta adds Visual Studio IDE, fully embraces .NET


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Sybase PowerBuilder 12 logoIn the early 1990s, before the introduction of the Web application upended the entire programming model, and businesses' local networks had yet to be connected to the Internet, a very serious battle took place in the emerging market of high-level client/server development systems. Microsoft helped legitimize that market with the introduction of Visual Basic, originally pushed toward businesses as a rapid business app development tool; and Borland helped blow the market wide open by devoting its Turbo Pascal expertise in a product called Delphi. But the seed product for this market had taken root the previous decade: a high-level interpreter with object-oriented foundation from Powersoft, called PowerBuilder.

While Visual Basic has flourished as one of Microsoft's many .NET languages, it changed its focus over the years to become a lower-level development system, capable of producing native executables in addition to intermediate language, managed code. But it was PowerBuilder that effectively established itself as the king of the client/server market it originally set out to conquer, especially with the one component in its favor that Microsoft could never duplicate: a little device called the DataWindow that gave developers and users an almost trouble-free way to access and manipulate databases in the seemingly infinite variety of formats that proliferated during that time.

That DataWindow was strong enough to trigger a billion-dollar buyout of Powersoft by Sybase in 1995; Microsoft may have had the stronger language, but the Jet database engine compared to the DataWindow the way a bottle rocket compares to an ICBM. Microsoft funded, and later commandeered, a similar effort to make all data uniformly visible, using a driver architecture called ODBC; but in terms of power that businesses could actually see, ODBC never came close.

In later years, Web languages like JavaScript and intermediate interpreters like Java and .NET began transforming the cutting edge of application development into something unrecognizable by 1995 standards. To its credit, PowerBuilder saw this coming, but the mindset shift necessary for it to fully embrace the change has been slow.

"In 1996, we had Java-based component generators in the [PowerBuilder] 6.5 release," recalled PowerBuilder 12 product manager Sue Dunnell, in an interview with Betanews, "so you could take a PowerBuilder non-visual object [NVO] and deploy it as a COM component or a Java component. And I think we were a little too far ahead of ourselves then; it wasn't something that really took off then. Then as Java really began to take off, we were very closely aligned with [Sybase] EA Server; and because of various decisions, we did not work well and play nice with other applications servers. That was a challenge if you wanted to go into the Java world.

PowerBuilder hasn't gone quietly into that good night. In fact, the demand for PowerBuilder skills nationwide remains astonishingly high. In 2006, Sybase released PB's first Applications Server plug-in, whose purpose was to enable PB objects, called NVOs, to be deployed within WebSphere, JBoss, or WebLogic environments (hopefully) without modification, appearing to them as though the NVO were an EJB (Enterprise Java Bean). Look closely at the job listings and you'll see that businesses want developers with dual PowerBuilder and Java skills. They're looking for a way to merge the past with the future; and up until now, the path to the future appeared to run through this plug-in.

Absolutely no one is under the assumption that the old client/server, OOP architecture can survive for very long. But thus far, Microsoft is the fountain from which most Windows-based languages flow these days, and its target market for Visual Studio is not the same business logic developer the company pursued in 1991 with Visual Basic.

"But what we found is, the need to support .NET is much greater, in that it's an entire platform. We've always been a Windows-based tool. .NET is the evolution of the Windows-based operating system, and it's really a platform. We certainly understand that we need to integrate well with Java, and we do. We provide APIs and the ability to integrate with Java, but it's much more of an integration strategy instead of an [evolutionary] strategy."

Playing nicely alongside existing code, pretending to be something it's not, was not as nice, in many developers' minds, as PowerBuilder embracing the Web as a platform and fully joining the party as a qualified player. A few years ago, some experts simply threw down the gauntlet, openly urging Sybase to make PowerBuilder a .NET language.

Today, with the announcement of the first public beta cycle for Sybase PowerBuilder 12, we see for the first time that Sybase had been planning this very migration path for some time now, for the thousands upon thousands of businesses whose logic remains rooted in a language whose architecture dates back to 1984. Unashamedly, without regret, PowerBuilder is casting off the old runtime interpreter, and is beginning to set aside its old development environment.

In their place, Sybase is remaking PowerBuilder as a .NET language unto itself, and is adopting Microsoft's "isolated" platform for Visual Studio (unilaterally licensed by Microsoft for use by any other company) as its new IDE. The experts are getting their wish.

"Today, we have an IDE that is Win32-based and that allows you to develop Win32 applications, and then deploy Win32 applications. But in addition to that, you can deploy that Win32 app as a Web form or a smart client. For version 12, we'll have that IDE and add some new functionality to it," stated Dunnell. "But in addition, we're having a brand new .NET-based IDE, and we're basing it on Visual Studio Shell." As an intellectual property partner with Microsoft, Dunnell said, Sybase has an engineering team that is working with Microsoft in, as she puts it, "building our IDE on the infrastructure of the Visual Studio Shell."

Next: Win32 lives on in PowerBuilder, but for how long?

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