Bruce Armstrong

PowerBuilder 12.5 introduced a number of significant enhancements to web services support, both for creation and consumption. In particular, the following were introduced as new features in PowerBuilder.NET: WCF client proxy WCF service target REST client proxy We're going to look at what those new features provide and how to use them. We're also going to look at how we can package some of that functionality so that it can be used from PowerBuilder Classic applications as well. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) First though, some background. When support for a web service client was first introduced in PowerBuilder 9, it was done based on an open source library called EasySOAP. There were some limitations with that implementation, primarily because the EasySOAP library only supported SOAP 1.1, was limited to XML over HTTP transport, and provided no support for an... (more)

How Quickly the Mighty Have Fallen

On November 9, Adobe announced in a blog post[1] that it had decided to cease efforts to develop browser plugins for mobile devices to play Flash, indicating that HTML5 was "the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms." In case that sounds like Adobe abandoned Flash entirely, it should be noted that Adobe indicated their intentions to continue to develop the AIR player for mobile devices, so that the role for Flash on mobile devices would be restricted to native apps, just not browser-based apps. A few days later in another blog po... (more)

Perhaps You Can Teach an Old Dog a New Trick Or Two…

Struggling to get familiar with the new PowerBuilder.NET IDE and the technology it allows you to use (e.g., WPF, REST, WCF and the rest of the alphabet soup)? Then you should run, not walk, over to the free eTutorial series that Sybase just made available for PowerBuilder 12.5. The training was put together by Yakov Werde. Yakov, for those who may not have heard of him, is the managing partner of eLearnIT LLC. Prior to that he spent more than 10 years as a trainer for Sybase, teaching classes on PowerBuilder, Java and .NET. And before that he was a software developer like you an... (more)

Silverlight Is Dead, Long Live Silverlight

There's been a lot of discussion since Microsoft's BUILD conference on the fate of Silverlight. (Something that is an issue for us because Sybase was originally looking at supporting it for web app development in PowerBuilder 15.) Contrary to what a number of the pundits and would-be pundits have said, I don't think it's quite accurate to say that Silverlight is dead in Windows 8. I think it's more accurate to say it's evolved. As background for those who haven't been following this closely, Microsoft announced that the Windows 8 operating system would support two kinds of appli... (more)

Say Hello to PowerBuilder 12.5!

By the time you read this, PowerBuilder 12.5 should be released. Like several ".5" releases before it (i.e., 6.5, 10.5 and 11.5), this release is a major release with a number of significant new features. We'll have a number of individual articles in PBDJ that will dive into these new features in greater detail. Given the editorial lead time, I wouldn't be surprised if you've even read a few by the time you read this! For now though, I'd like to give a brief overview of what you'll see in this new version. PowerBuilder Classic Just to show that you haven't been ignored if you're s... (more)