There are generally two options/approaches that would be the least amount of work:
1. Convert the EAServer NVOs to client-side NVOs (i.e. go back to a 2-tier client/server app)
2. Port your EAServer NVOs to C# Web APIs with PB 2018: https://www.appeon.com/pb2018.html
Appeon is providing EAServer customers with "insider" releases of PB 2018 so they can begin their migration now. You would need to contact the sales dept. sales@appeon.com to arrange this.
For the sake of being complete, PowerBuilder does have a .NET Web Service target that deploys existing PowerScript NVOs as SOAP Web services, but that is an obsolete feature. So even though it is in the product, it is not being enhanced or receiving updates and therefore it is not wise to use that as an EAServer migration approach.
Hi Sally,
The obsolete feature is the .NET assembly target in the native PowerBuilder IDE (not Visual Studio). The Visual Studio IDE Sybase created for PB 12 was never launched to the market by Appeon due to poor market adoption and quality issues.
There is no need to change from a PowerBuilder desktop client to a Web browser client. Of course you can do this, but this could be a lot more extra work depending on how you decide to migrate to a B/S architecture. In case you do want to run in the web browser, we have a product called PowerServer Web that automatically converts a PowerBuilder desktop client (most PB features) to run in a web browser. A free developer edition is included with the PowerBuilder Universal Edition license.
Now back to your EAServer question, the migration tools provided in PB 2018 to port the EAServer NVOs to C# .NET assemblies focuses on the DataWindows. The PowerScript would need to be hand-coded in C#, but since the coding is based on DataWindow and the C# DataWindow has similar properties, events, functions, so I think you will find it is not very difficult. Please take a look at these code examples to get an idea: http://showcase.appeon.com/showcase_2_201.html
Once your EAServer NVOs are ported to C# .NET assemblies with PowerBuilder 2018, your existing PowerBuilder client can call these C# .NET assemblies as REST Web APIs. In PowerBuilder 2017 R3 we added tons of features so DataWindows can readily and easily consume REST Web APIs. In PowerBuilder 2018, we also automatically create a REST Web API wrapper around your .NET assemblies (if you choose the C# Web API target option that is shown in the video).
Hope this clears some things up. I think it'll make a lot more sense if you grab an "insider" release of PB 2018 and try to do a proof-of-concept migration of one of your EAServer NVOs.
Regards,
Armeen
Thanks a lot. I sent an email to sales.dept to get the insider release of PB 2018. But no responding till now. Do you know any other procedure to get that?