Future of powerbuilder: powerbuilder

by: Joe_WoodhousePosted on 2009-05-25 at 07:08:05ID: 24466711

I obviously don't speak for Sybase and I haven't worked for them for over 6 years.

In my unofficial opinion, PowerBuilder won't go away. It makes up a serious percentage of Sybase's total revenues. I don't see any long term changes.

This is exactly the sort of question you could ask your local Sybase Sales rep. While obviously they have a vested interest in the answer they give you, they know better than you or I what the worldwide and national (for your country) numbers are like for PowerBuilder.

by: grant300Posted on 2009-05-25 at 07:10:18ID: 24466720

It is never a good idea to base ones entire career on a single product. That said, PowerBuilder has gained new life with Appeon as a viable web deployment option. PowerBuilder will be around for a while yet.

One of the issues today is that there are so many tools, languages, and frameworks out there that they all get dilluted. In the early 90's, it was easy because you had maybe three or four common options for client server programming; Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, Gupta SQL Windows, and fill in your own fourth. Also, things were only really deployed on Windows desktops so there was a signle target platform.

As it is now, you have to support at 4 deployment targets, Web, Linux, Mac, and Windows with Web being the lowest common denominator. There are also more languages and stacks than you can count on both hands. Web deployment has also brought a middle tier of web and application servers. Life just isn't simple any more

"Client/server" got a bad reputation because of the enormous percentage of poorly architected and executed systems. Ironically, the complexity of web-based deployments means there are even more ways to screw things up (and most apps are), however, the expectations for web applications are lower. The nice things about PowerBuilder and Appion is that you can build high-quality client server applications and then deploy them on the web without having to specify, build, and maintain a complex stack of a dozen products or more.

FWIW....

Regards,
Bill

by: alpmoonPosted on 2009-05-25 at 18:01:48ID: 24469537

My answer to this question is not a technical one. I don't think that sticking with one technology is a bad idea. However, you may need to take a break during recessions as number of new projects diminishes very quickly.

We are still in recession and don't expect many new projects based on relatively expensive technologies. I thought about swithcing to another technology in 2001-2002. Then I preferred to relax and wait even though I was out of contract for many months. Then everything became OK after economy started to growing again.

Now the contraction in economy is much higher than 2001. You should be patient or diverse your skills.

by: PBProductMgrPosted on 2009-05-26 at 07:42:40ID: 24473772

As the product manager, I can tell you about our roadmap and usage in the market. It may not seem like there are new customers or new applications being built in PowerBuilder, but there are many new projects being done each year, and we are always getting new customers to use the product as well. The biggest issue is probably our lack of product focused marketing in traditional channels, so you don't "see" a lot of PowerBuilder out there. We've been working on changing that, and our next couple of releases should attract a lot of attention. We have the v12 release in a private Customer Technology Preview, with a beta due out this summer. We are building our next release of PowerBuilder on top of the Visual Studion IDE; we are putting the VS shell inside of PowerBuilder, enabling our engineers to focus on building differentiating technology rather than on maintaining an IDE. We have been working on a 4 phase plan to deliver .NET support, and version 12 is the 4th phase of that plan. With this release, we will have an IDE to support .NET in design time, native support for WPF, a DataWindow that was rewritten in C# and supports WPF, and PB applications will generate managed code. We will also ship with v12 a separate IDE that is basically what customers are using today in v11.5. We are also working closely with Microsoft as a VSIP partner and have been attending a lot of their events, sponsoring shows with a booth and meeting the customers we both share. Our future plans for PowerBuillder include delivering an IDE to support Silverlight (post v12) so we are very excited about our upcoming releases. Again, the biggest challenge is the lack of PowerBuilder in the market; we are working on customer success stories to post, and the analyst firm IDC wrote a whitepaper about PowerBuilder that we will be posting to our website soon. recently If you'd like to talk further, please email sue.dunnell@gmail.com or call me at 978 287 1752.

by: Treety_PatnaikPosted on 2009-05-29 at 23:17:50ID: 24507983

Thanks ........ From ur comment i come to know about the future of power builder .........

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Future of powerbuilder

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