Have you heard / seen B4X (Cross platform RAD development tools | B4X).  It gives basic like syntax and an excellent visual designer (WYSIWYG editor) which really makes the app development faster.  Before deciding give this a try.

Happiness Always
BKR Sivaprakash

Hi,

we used PSMobile for many years.

First parts of our Apps have been moved to Flutter until today and we are happy with Flutter.

We checked different solutions (like React Native, Xamarin and Flutter) to move our pb based mobile apps.

The winner was Flutter.

Until 2025 we plan to finish migration all of our apps.

The problem with any conversion of Desktop to mobile, as far as I can see, is the huge amount of time it will take you to create the visual front end part. To start with, there can be so many attributes and expressions in any column or computed column of a datawindow, that doing this in any other language could take forever. What could be nice though, is have mobile apps that do specific parts of your desktop app, maybe some reporting to start with. I'd definitely not try to convert, but start from scratch.

Then another added problem is all of the business logic that might be all over the place in PB. If you have documentation, that would help, but are you sure that it's 100% up to date? (I have never seen that happen in my 29 years experience in 3 different countries). If not, you still have to reverse engineer your code.

:)

windows tablets you can use powerserver.

the other question is whether you have back end type of processing written in PB.  If its just dataentry screens, that's one thing, but if you are processing the data via PB code then you need to either convert it all to (c#/java etc)  --or-- call your powerbuilder code from a webapi (assuming its callable as a NVOs, and that the volume doesn't spike to overwhelm the server).

Our mobile companion app to our main PowerBuilder application is a web application built using ASP.NET Core MVC.  It is responsive to mobile viewport size (i.e. PC versus tablet versus phone) using Bootstrap 4 CSS.  Our mobile solution is a web app because customers were interested in thin client and simple application management.  

We chose ASP.NET Core MVC for the mobile web app because it's the same technology that Appeon supports for their SnapObjects framework and .NET Datastore.  Our mobile web app accesses data through a Web API built using these Appeon technologies.  

To complete the picture, we have code at 4 levels:

• JavaScript to make the web application responsive
• ASP.NET Core MVC web application to build HTML from Razor pages (including HTML returned to Ajax requests to support dynamic page manipulation)
• ASP.NET Core MVC web API to return data to the web app and initiate business processing, built using Appeon SnapObjects and .NET Datastore
• Business processing logic in database stored procedures

We migrated business processing logic into stored procedures so the same code can be easily used by both our PowerBuilder legacy application and our new mobile web application.  Our legacy PowerBuilder application already used a lot of stored procedures, so this became the easiest point of commonality.  

FWIW - We had architected our legacy PowerBuilder application with non visual business objects that encapsulated all business functionality, separated out from any UI.  This worked really well.  The business objects were available for reuse from any business processing in our PowerBuilder application.  Unfortunately this nice, tested PowerBuilder code is just not usable within our web architecture, so we are pushing as much as possible down into stored procedures which can be used by both the legacy and mobile web app.