| PowerBuilder: My Passion | |||||||||||||||||||
| What is PowerBuilder? | My views and experiences with PB |
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| PowerBuilder
is a graphical application development environment. Using
PowerBuilder, you can easily develop powerful graphical
applications that access server databases. PowerBuilder
provides all the tools you need to build industrial-strength
applications, such as order entry, accounting, and
manufacturing systems. PowerBuilder applications consist of windows that contain controls that users interact with. You can use all the standard controls--such as buttons, checkboxes, dropdown listboxes, and edit controls--as well as special PowerBuilder controls that make your applications easy to develop and easy to use. PowerBuilder supports cross-platform development and deployment. For example, you can develop an application using PowerBuilder under Windows (either Windows 95 or Windows NT) and deploy the very same application--without changes--on a Windows 3.1, Macintosh, or UNIX machine. You can even have a cross-platform team of developers, some using Windows and some using the Macintosh, developing the same application at the same time. They can freely share PowerBuilder objects used in the application, because the objects are the same across the different computing platforms that PowerBuilder supports. PowerBuilder includes a number of tools that let you build web-based applications and extend your existing applications to the Internet. |
I have
been working with PowerBuilder since version 3.0, Now PB
is into its latest version 6.0 I had the opportunity of developing from simple PB applications to very large and complex ones From PB 5.0 onwards PowerBuilder has introduced a new concept of PowerSoft Foundation Class Libraries (PFC). This is an entirely new and dynamic approach, which makes PB score much more than any other development tools available in the market today. Its object oriented feature is improving with each new version it markets. PB definately has a very promising future. |
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| Something about PFC | |||||||||||||||||||
| The PFC (Powersoft
Foundation Class) is the first class library created by
Powersoft. It was released with version 5 and is intended
to assist developers in building applications. It is
architected in a manner to save development time by using
prebuilt classes of objects for standard functionality.
The PFC can be extended to add corporate and/or
application specific functionality. This is based on a service based architecture (SBA). The theory behind this is that instead of having a 'fat client' ancestor structure, functionality is placed in services that can be turned on as needed. This method delivers smaller objects that can be developed and maintained for specific functionality. The advantage is that instead of loading a large ancestor with all the possible functionality that an object might need, a smaller ancestor is loaded with instance variables of other types of objects. Since these instance variables simply are a type of object, there is considerably less overhead when opening and accessing the ancesor object. Then as the application needs specific functionality, the instances are instantiated. This will lead to improved performance |
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times.