Gian Luca De Bonis

In the last few years many customers I consult for have asked how to modernize their PowerBuilder applications and their development skill set. They want to go to the Web, they want to embrace .NET, and, in general, they don't want to fall behind. I can sense their anxiety, but there are some good approaches that make this transition relatively quick and easy. This article is intended to help all those in this predicament. Most customers I speak to basically tell me the same thing, "We have client/server applications that work well, we've invested a lot of resources to develop them, and PowerBuilder is a very fast and easy tool. But we need to keep up with the times and, going forward, our projects need to be Web-based." As they tell me this, I can hear the voice inside their head that is really asking, "What are we to do? Do we really need to junk our existing cli... (more)

Enable Runtime Explorer with Automatic Source Change

Application development and maintenance require frequent iterations between design time and runtime. This process is necessarily time-consuming, imprecise, and somewhat frustrating. True, this is a characteristic of RAD environments...but isn't there a better way? Runtime-driven development represents a step in the right direction. This article talks about Enable Runtime Explorer (Rex) and shows how a new development cycle can benefit the daily activities of PowerBuilder developers. Enable Runtime Explorer Rex is a tool for developers that implements the runtime-driven developmen... (more)