William -
I do hope you have looked at the statistics regarding projects that have attempted to move away from PowerBuilder to Java: the failure rate is enormous! If possible, it's better to add on to existing, working code than it is to attempt to rewrite the entire thing.
It is also better to user other tools as a supplement to the basic cPowerBuilder code. For example, we all know that PowerBuilder is terrible at batch processing, so in our shop we developed a package in Java specifically to handle the batch processing we required. We call it with the RUN command where the command string includes all of the parameters required. We use the time event to check to see if the Java code is still active, and when it completes we trigger the of_finish_up() PowerBuilder function to complete the required processing.
One last thing: it is our job as developers to decide what is smart and what is NOT smart, and to relay that information to the boss. Remember, it's the job of the boss to tell you WHAT he wants, and it's your job to determine HOW that get's done.
JMHO,
Olan