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Resolved Advice and recommendation on PowerBuilder

  1. How-to
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  1. Michael Volkert
    Michael Volkert
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. Wednesday, 28 October 2020 11:44 AM UTC

Dear Community,

I work as a software developer for ERGO Direkt AG. I would be very happy to receive a professional assessment of the following situation.

We have been developing a surface with the PowerBuilder (Powerscript) technology for our claims and benefits processing software since the 1990s. The communication between the PowerBuilder and our JAVA backend takes place with stateful EJBs (Java 1.7). Adjustments and further developments are currently being implemented with the PowerBuilder version 2017 R3. The PowerGen 2017 tool (E. Crane Computing) supports our build process for generating the client application.

The knowledge and experience regarding PowerBuilder and PowerScript are rather limited after leaving our lead developer within the team. In this way, features and adjustments to the interfaces can be implemented, but the specialist knowledge of the general build process and communication based on interfaces within PowerBuilder is virtually non-existent.

Our goal is now:
- make changes (including stateful EJBs -> REST web services) to the extent that a development with the PowerBuilder technology is future-proof for the next few decades
- replace support tools such as PowerGen 2017 and execute build processes using the PowerBuilder features that are already included


The following questions:

1. How about here, the right way to achieve our goals?

2. What difficulties can we face in implementation?

Thank you in advance for your advice and assessment.

Best regards
Michael Volkert

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Responses (1)
Armeen Mazda @Appeon
Armeen Mazda @Appeon Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Wednesday, 28 October 2020 23:24 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 1

I honestly think it would be best you reach out to one of our consulting partners that has experience with this and have them give you assessment and even consider they implement the changes for you.  I doubt you are going to get proper assessment or enough details through this type of Q&A.

With that said, I will give you my .02 cents on some of the topics you raised.

1. EJB Conversion - yes, absolutely the way you should interface with EJBs or any other business logic (no matter what programming language) on the server is through REST Web APIs.  Make sure your REST Web API is returning JSON and use as much of the REST features of PowerBuilder to simplify programming.  You should also implement token (e.g. JWT) so your REST Web APIs are secure.  I recommend watching the REST Bootcamp.

2. PowerGen - this is honestly not a bad product, but I can understand you want to simplify things and not rely on third-party if possible.  The alternative to look at would be the PB compiler.  There is a video about this, and if you want to go further and do continuous integration then take a look at this tech article.

3. PB 2019 R3 - depending on the timing of your project, I would recommend upgrading to PowerBuilder 2019 R3 (currently in Beta and final release scheduled for January 2021).  It has much more REST-related features than PB 2017 R3, it has new feature called PowerClient, and the decoupling of IDE and runtime is going to make your development much more flexible, and many more features.

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