PowerBuilder 10

Berndt Hamboeck

hamboeck@pocketpb.com

Agenda

Major features in PowerBuilder 10 Plug-In technology and PowerDesigner EAServer components as WebServices UDDI support in PowerBuilder XML-Web DataWindow DataWindow .NET Unicode support

Other changes

Plug-In Technology

Plug-In Technology

The good news!!

Plug-In technology will be open for everyone PB community can write own Plug-Ins

PBGenericPlugin100.dll appears to be COM component Plugins stored in registry

HKLM\Software\Sybase\PowerBuilder\10.0\PBPlugins

Plug-In Technology

The bad news!!

Specification not before PowerBuilder 11 for the public

PowerDesigner Plug-In

Many Applications in use today have not undergone formal design

Many applications have a less than desirable architecture This makes the application difficult to maintain This makes the application difficult to enhance

Few client/server applications can easily be partitioned for n-tier or web deployment

It has been a market trend of late to integrate programming and modeling tools

With PowerBuilder 10, application designers anddevelopers now have a productive design anddevelopment integration tool

Web Services Enhancements

Web Services Enhancements

The PowerBuilder developer no longer needs to utilize the Web Services Toolkit within Jaguar Manager or Eclipse

PowerBuilder 10 will allow developers to deploy their components (NVOs) directly to EAServer 5.0 as (Axis) Web Services

Web Services Enhancements - UDDI

UDDI - Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Service is an industry-wide effort to bring a common standard for business-to-business (B2B) integration

It defines a set of standard interfaces for accessing a database/directory of web services

As a pioneer of web service implementations, we provide this web interface to the live registries

Web Services Enhancements - UDDI

Simply put, if a user wants to search for a web service on the Internet, they can use the new UDDI browser to find it

Web Services Enhancements - UDDI

Web Services Enhancements - UDDI

PowerBuilder 10 provides wizards to guide developers for UDDI browsing and consuming searched Web Services in both PowerBuilder applications and JSP clients

PB developers may also use this UDDI searching capability and build it into their PB applications since this UDDI feature would be delivered as a PBNI extension

Web Services Enhancements - UDDI

DataWindow.NET

DataWindow.NET

DataWindow.NET

Provide DataWindow.NET Classes in C#

Use DataWindow for building your .NET applications

Use DataWindow controls in your Windows Form now, and Web Forms soon

Unicode

Unicode enabling

PB 10 will be fully Unicode enabled Multiple languages within same DataWindow

Developers may input, retrieve and display multiple languages in Unicode

Within the same window Within the same DataWindow. Develop your application in single set of codes and deploy to different language

environments

Unicode enabling Unicode enabling - Definitions

DBCS - double-byte character set– Uses 1 byte to represent a character such as ASCII

and European languages. – Use double bytes to represent a character such as

Chinese, Japanese. – Different languages have different character sets/code

pages!!!

DBCS PBL– The PBL developed in PowerBuilder 9/8/7. – The encoding for source code in PBL is in DBCS.

Unicode enabling Unicode enabling - Definitions

Unicode– Unicode provides a unique number for every character,

no matter what the platforms/languages are. – It uses a single coded character set that maps each

character in the abstract repertoire to a 21-bit value.

Unicode PBL– The PBL developed in PB10 and above. – The encoding for source code is in Unicode

Unicode enabling String-Related Functions

In PowerScript, some string manipulation functions have been modified to handle Unicode data.

Affected functions:– Calculating the length of a string– Manipulating a string based its length or the absolute position within

a string– Deriving sub-strings. – WinAPI

Exporting/Importing When you export an object to a .sr* file, you can choose to export it in ANSI,

HEXASCII, UTF-8, or UTF-16LE formats. When you import a file with any format, PowerBuilder converts it to Unicode.

Unicode enabling New Functions

The AscW function converts the first character of a string to its Unicode code point. A code point is the numerical integer value given to a Unicode character.

The CharW function extracts the first Unicode character from a string or converts an integer to a char.

The FileLenth64 and FileSeek64 provide support for larger files and return a longlong value and can be used with files of any size.

Overloaded functions String (blob, encoding) Blob (string, encoding)

Unicode enabling

PowerBuilder 10 helps you during migration!

Convert DBCS String-Manipulation Functions check box on the Migrate Application dialog box, Asc is converted to AscW and Char to CharW.

Converts API calls using String parameters Private Function Long mciExecute (String lpstrCommand) Library "winmm.dll"

alias for "mciExecute;Ansi"

XHTML Web DataWindow

XHTML Web DataWindow

The HTML Web DataWindow so far

XHTML Web DataWindow

HTMLGenerator 90 DataWindow generated entirely in static HTML page Regeneration required on every roundtrip to server

Server processing/scalability unnecessarily strained Bandwidth misspent on unnecessary downloads

Generator is string-buffer-based, limiting extensibility Customization of generated HTML or CSS not supported

ALL of the presentation markup is generated too often

XHTML Web DataWindow

“When do I use the XHTML Web DataWindow?”

Since the XHTML Web DW can cache the presentation and stylesheet on the client…

…the XHTML Web DW works especially well for graphically rich DataWindows which are meant for the user to ‘scroll’ through multiple pages of data

XHTML Web DataWindow

XHTML Web DataWindow now

XHTML Web DataWindow

The XHTML Web DataWindow builds upon theexisting HTML Web DataWindow plus:

XML-based architecture Updated web technologies Improved performance using less bandwidth

Using XHTML as the ultimate/final markup also affords the ability to customize that markup logically within the PowerBuilder IDE.

Standardizes on the latest client-side XML technologies of the version 6 browsers.

XHTML Web DataWindow

The XML Web DataWindow is essentially designed to separate the content, the layout, and the style of the DataWindow on the Web

Since the XSLT (the layout) and the CSS (the stylesheet) may be cached on the client, only the relatively small XML content (dynamic/displayed data) consumes bandwidth on subsequent downloads as the user ‘browses’ the data

XHTML Web DataWindow

The DataWindow engine generates each of these components at runtime.

XHTML

XML Content

XSLT

CSS

Determines style ofelements as displayedin browser

Determinesstructural layout

XHTML Web DataWindow

Other features

Other New Features in PowerBuilder 10

ADO.NET The System.Data.OleDb namespace is the .NET Framework

Data Provider for OLE DB.

Future:

Build full .NET applications in PB IDE

Consume .NET objects in PB applications

Convert existing PB apps to Web apps

With 1 set of codes, optionally build Windows or Web applications

Other New Features in PowerBuilder 10

Exception handling support in machine code

Additional parameter for SaveAsAscii Boolean RetainNewLineChar. whether line feed and carriage return characters

contained within the row are converted to white space. false (default) - line feed and carriage return characters within the row are converted to white space

Other New Features in PowerBuilder 10

Environment variables for memory management exceptions in EAServer for PB components

508 Accessibility Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires that when Federal

departments or agencies develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology, they shall ensure that the technology is accessible to people with disabilities.

§1194.21 specifies the requirements for software applications and operating systems.

http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.21.htm

PowerBuilder 10

Berndt Hamboeck

hamboeck@pocketpb.com