I've been doing PB for 29 years. I've worked in almost every industry, used almost every database, and worked on applications and teams of all sizes. I've worked on two-tier, three-tier, and even four-tier applications.

I've been lucky enough to work on some GREAT applications. But more often than not, there were more than a few average-to-extremely poor applications.

It's been my experience during that time that in almost every instance of a poorly designed application that the Client/Customer/Company/Military Organization *BLAMED THE SOFTWARE* instead of the people responsible for creating/maintaining.

Also, there tends to be an unwillingness to clean-up large scale projects. They would rather just "rewrite" in a "newer" ( to them that means "better" ) technology.

My current organization, going back over 20 years, often used poor development ( NO TESTING, NO CODING STANDARDS ) and training ( force-fitting people with minimal training ) practices. That's what created the worst applications I've ever worked on.

I highlighted that and yet they're still blaming PowerBuilder.

One of the most common practices I've seen in my career is designing/building applications that don't completely function correctly and still ended up in production. To make matters worse, they would continue to migrate the application forward without fixing the issue because they thought it was a problem with the development software. Broken components - windows, datawindows, etc. - would continue to fail. Therefore, it was a "PowerBuilder" problem.

I inherited an application at one company where they had multiple broken windows and menus in the production applications. This has been a very common occurrence during my time as a contractor/PB developer.

The current applications I'm working with have dozens of tickets that need to be worked. Most of which are 10-15 YEARS old. Mindboggling.

But unfortunately, that word-of-mouth poor reputation has long cascaded throughout the industry. That's a major problem.

I've long stood up for the defense of PowerBuilder, much to no avail. Especially since it was easy to shout down the extremely small minority ( it's been very common for me to be the ONLY developer working PB on a 25-40 man teams ). But I've even provided examples and challenges to coworkers and was never defeated. PowerBuilder's ability to be dynamic, easy to use, and flexible is superior. The highlight was when I challenged the Java team one year - It wasn't even close - took them 4 times as long to do something very simple.

But as long as companies and corporations continue to scream loudly about everything PowerBuilder lacks ( because they're not willing to see all the major improvements and upgrades over the last 10+ years ), it will continue to be a very steep, uphill battle. The industry will continue to take the "see no evil, hear no evil" approach, yet continue to speak evil due to a failure of willingness to listen and learn.

To Summarize,

1.  Community Edition
2.  Education license [ Free / Paid / Discounted]
3.  Introduce [influence colleges] to add PowerBuilder
4.  Separate site to list PB Job

4th one will induce colleges to add PowerBuilder into their curriculum.  

1.  Community Edition:  Appeon has a different view.  Not sure whether appeon will come out with one.

2.  Educational License:  Appeon should introduce a special price for educational institutions who wants to add PowerBuilder into their curriculum.

3.  Marketing:  Colleges should be influenced to add PB.  One way is start sponsoring college events.  Marketing guys could come out with more.

4.  Separate site to list PB Jobs:  Needless to say, the importance of this.

Let's see what other members think.

I'm about to retire and hand over the PB source code to my clients. They are going to struggle to find a PB developer to support them going forward. I thought that I would use the migration tool to convert to .NET and give them that source...

1. Is it possible/viable/a good idea to migrate the PB apps to .NET because then they will have more chance of finding a .NET developer?

2. Would a .NET developer be able to understand the code after it has been migrated, i.e. is it well structured?

Sorry if this is slightly off topic, but this may be the only path forward for legacy PB applications.

My main concern with PowerBuilder is the end-90s looks!

It seems funny but young employees that are used to iPhones and web application get REALLY SCARED once they take a look at our PB application forms.

So we are in a position where our app is really good but new users do not want to use it.

I had a hope that the ugly menus and toolbars would have a better, more automatic, less demanding (code changes wise) way to get replaced.

I wish Appeon can do something more drastic so we can revamp our PB apps easier and get them look better.

These might seem shallow but it is the case for us.

Hi all,

I leaved PB almost 10 years ago and 2 years ago I returned, because of maintaining few old apps. In the mean time I was C# developer.

Here are some of my thougs:

1. PB documentation, best practices even samples are almost in same condition as before. That is shame, because after those years there is not where to learn, how to develop modern app in PB. I'm not talking about PB Server, because my interest is modern dektop app with DB behind it. I'm not talking about UI. Our customers are satisfied with "old" look and feel and they do not want UI as M$Office has nor webapp. They have quiet large forms in old PB app and they like it. I'm talking about modern design principles, separation of coserns, .... unit testing, .... Our old app is mess of hard to maintain code and this cannot attract any young dev.

2. I had few problems which I remember I had in past and forgot it. I looked for solution, hours, hours (some troubles was with using datastore instead of datawindows for data manipulation, sometimes helped export/import object and it fixed issue, ....., last problem was with function with more prototypes with differen number of arguments, did not work, export object sort prototypes from few to more parameters, import back and issue solved) Those types of werid behaviors are extremely bad. In C# if something does not work, you can debug, find, repair, .. In PB most problems are magic in the end.

3. PB does good what did good 10years ago, you can rapidly create new database intensive app, that is for sure. But without propper coding in few years it become nightmare and here can help some example app with best practices. Which will make easier to maintain or modernize applications.

So I thing that it is possible to make PB more attractive, but it will be a lot of work on doc, tutorials, examples to let people know that in PB you can make app with modern design principles (not only semi templated UI). Learn pepople how to Unit test PB aplications.  Problem is that it is not clear if it success after all. World has changed and rapid UI development is not so sexy as it was 15 years ago. Databases are different, not all are relational databases. 

I'm thinking how developers in Lisp, Cobol, Fortran are. I wish best to PowerBuilder and may be someone clever will find way how to make PB more attractive to young devs. 

For me there is almost only way to find someone who will maintain apps for our customers, port application to C# or something like C# :-( 

A.

I've been using PB for almost 30 years... yikes!  Can't believe I'm that old already!  My initial investment was PowerSoft's version 3.  I agree that PB apps are extremely bullet-proof.  I asked my customers years ago if there was another app on their PC's that are as old as my app?  Nope.

When it looked like the writing was on the wall for the death of PB many years ago, I looked into other technologies.  Absolutely nothing compares to the power of the datawindow... nothing.

Corporations are very short-sighted... extremely short-sighted.  PB applications have a longer life span than everything I'm aware of.  Return On Investment (ROI) is tremendous for PB app development.  But they're all attracted to the newest gadgets.  And, they all want young, cheap developers who "know everything"... lol!  I wonder if they ever do an ROI on the failed projects they've funded?  

Appeon has been a blessing to the future of PowerBuilder, and the community support is world-class.  I used PB5 for many years (10+)... didn't upgrade until PB12 (Sybase).  So the new annual license renewal is more expensive for me, but I understand Appeon has to earn a living too, and I'm guessing a lot of us didn't upgrade very often (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).  I do love the fact that even though I do have to renew my subscription every year, I don't have to upgrade my software.  But it's available if I need it.

My customer's recently complained because they had to buy 2 upgrades from me in the last 2 years (many still haven't done either upgrade), and re-install PB runtime.  I just remind them that the last upgrade they had to pay for was almost 10 years ago.  Do these corporations even do ROI analysis anymore?

Maybe the right solution is to educate corporations about the benefits of PowerBuilder.  (Good luck with that, the decision makers are not very tech savvy). A good programmer can learn PowerBuilder pretty quickly.  Especially with a senior PB developer heading up the development team.

Offering PowerBuilder college-level courses is a good idea too.  Then these young programmers can put "PowerBuilder" on their resume.

My 2 cents worth,
~~~Tracy

If you want to make a good (if not great) impression with PB then you have to do things differently; not like in the 1990's or early 2000's.  I have met and worked with way too many PB developers who are doing the same things they did as when they started using the tool.  You might have twenty-five years experience but gained it one year at a time twenty-five times over.

There have been many UI related sessions at conferences but what do you see? The same thing designed by some 25 year old computer science grad back in 1998.  Just 'cause "it ain't broke" doesn't mean it cannot be fixed.  I am near the end of a project which has completely transformed the look of the PB application it's based on and all I basically did was make windows resizable, get rid of the silver/button face colors, eliminate the dated '3d' buttons, and change the fonts.  The users are THRILLED.

Does this mean that eventually the company may move away from PB? I don't know but I am not too worried about that for a long time.  If I were to suggest something to the community / Appeon it would be to improve the online docs for the newer technologies (JSON array parsing is a real pain point in general). 

Just having a educational or express version of the tool (although I am in favor of this) would not solve the issue for young programmers.  There needs to be more and more current content available on line.  I've done this in the past and it's not easy to maintain a stream of quality information.  The current Appeon Q&A board is kinda nice but isn't really geared to finding previous answers or researching solutions.

Hi,

I think the biggest challenges are:

People are not willing to invest time / money in learning powerbuilder after doing a search on available jobs. There's just a few and most of them aren't very interesting.

Companies are not willing to create new applications in Powerbuilder after investigating how many people are skilled in Powerbuilder and available.

just my experience.

regards,

MiguelL

Apart from all the discussion we do, the most important thing would be

TO BREAK THE MYTH THAT POWERBUILDER IS OLD

This would be the most important challenge that Appeon and PB users need to overcome.

Happiness Always
BKR Sivaprakash

I would like to share my views on Armeen reply (or official Appeon view)

The talent resource issue is best solved by the existing PB customers hiring new blood and training them in PB by utilizing Appeon-U or our consulting partners or getting staff augmentation from our consulting partners.

PB developers are going to give training in PB by utilizing Appeon-U or with their internal talent or by hiring consulting partners.   This is not the question that the developers put in here.  What they expect should they pay the same license fee for PB that's going to be used for training purpose alone.   Can't Appeon do something on this front?   like introducing a community edition.   

As far as offering a community edition of PB, this isn't going to magically solve the problem.  The only time community edition becomes important is when the motivation is there for many people to proactively invest to learn on their own time. 

Definitely community edition is not going to be used by any developers to develop mission-critical applications.  Still it (or its equivalent) exists in many other products which is having its own place.   To give training by any house, these could very well be used, which Appeon cannot get the data to calculate any statistics.   Definitely it has got its own place.

Since PB has much smaller market share than .NET for example, somebody who is career-focused is not going to be motivated to learn PB on their own (even if PB was free).  So brings me back to the point there needs to be a job offer along with the employer taking initiative to train up to create set of conditions somebody try to learn.  

Employers are taking care of that, no doubt.  Just because it's happening it cannot be termed as ideal.  Won't it be better if such things gets added up.

I should add that according to Google Analytics of registrations for accounts to use PowerBuilder/InfoMaker, 69.19% of users is 44 years or younger and 44.21% of our users is 34 or younger.  So these are hard numbers to back up my anecdote that many customers are able to get new staff and that it is do-able to staff PB projects for the long-term.

Appeon could add up to the above, how many licenses has been sold to new PB houses (projects) since the release of PB 2017.   This might give a better picture and also more confidence to us all.

Happiness Always
BKR Sivaprakash

As someone who has 10 years of PB development experience I suddenly feel younger now  . 

• Community Version : This is something that will be great for people like me who work in Asia, where the average starting salary of developer is $200 a month. One cannot afford to buy those cloud license which take months of income even for an experienced developer. 
• Target other Geographic regions too: North America has seen this trend of moving toward cloud in past decade which puts desktop applications in an awkward position. Alternatively the rest of the world is not yet that much into cloud usage, for example Asia, Middle East, Africa & South America. This can be an excellent market for starting new Powerbuilder projects but again the PB license is a major issue in these countries along with marketing. 
• Freelancer : As one of the few freelancer who dare to work in Powerbuilder, it is not economically viable to buy license. The number of projects are almost zero in the major marketplace and it is very hard to have a continuous income this way.
• Business Intelligence tool: When I use Power BI or Tableau tools they have very limited capabilities as compared to Powerbuilder to handle data and manipulate it. I suggest the marketing team should have a look at how to sell this feature of Powerbuilder to the data handling people. 
•  Teaching new people PB: I think this is something that is driven by market. If someone tell me to go learn delphi I will not do it unless I feel it will have economic or educational value to my life. Similarly If new Powerbuilder projects will start then people will itself look for ways to learn it and then others will provide the services to share their knowledge. By the way nowadays one can just go to different site like Udemy, Youtube and put the courses over there for everyone to learn. 

That is true. PowerBuilder is still there because i am not dead yet.

2 days ago i gave a video of a sample PowerBuilder project to a friend of mine but before that video i gave him a real good impression of PowerBuilder environment. I am still waiting for his response.

He was not worried about how much license cost was. He wanted to see the PB app interface. Really, the thing in my mind that pinches me now is that, if my friend is thinking what will he do if later i am either dead or not there with him to work on his PB app. If that happens, will raise a situation for him for sure.

That is about investors but how about Appeon itself? Well, open source gave a face punch to many big companies like Microsoft, Nokia, motrolla etc.

Appeon pumped more fule into development environment but still technology is not hybrid.

I suggest that PowerBuilder, PowerServer and all related products should be open source.

When you stop earning money you start to do things Just For Good.

Hi,

I want to share official view of Appeon on this important subject. The talent resource issue is best solved by the existing PB customers hiring new blood and training them in PB by utilizing Appeon-U or our consulting partners or getting staff augmentation from our consulting partners.

I am not saying this is ideal, but this is the reality and definitely do-able.  We have many customers who have done this because other than this issue you point out, PB overall does serve their companies reasonably well and the cost & risk of rewriting the app is usually too huge to make any business sense.

As far as offering a community edition of PB, this isn't going to magically solve the problem.  The only time community edition becomes important is when the motivation is there for many people to proactively invest to learn on their own time. 

Since PB has much smaller market share than .NET for example, somebody who is career-focused is not going to be motivated to learn PB on their own (even if PB was free).  So brings me back to the point there needs to be a job offer along with the employer taking initiative to train up to create set of conditions somebody try to learn.  

I should add that according to Google Analytics of registrations for accounts to use PowerBuilder/InfoMaker, 69.19% of users is 44 years or younger and 44.21% of our users is 34 or younger.  So these are hard numbers to back up my anecdote that many customers are able to get new staff and that it is do-able to staff PB projects for the long-term.

Best regards,
Armeen

Most of the time there will be several job listings for Albany, NY. The client is state government and there are dozens of small and large consulting firms looking to fill the same few slots. I worked there for awhile about 6 years ago on their workers comp claims system. They had PB 10.5 and EAServer and probably still do.

PowerSoft had a Desktop Edition that could only connect to ODBC databases located on the same computer. The cost was under $500.

Today’s young generation wants to learn Cyber Security - not PowerBuilder. They never heard the word “PowerBuilder” nor are they interested in knowing what it is, sadly.

A very interesting subject. Interestingly enough I have been talking with the CEO of one of our major competitors about this issue. The fact that the PB developer pool is shrinking and how we are going to have to train young people in PB. In the past we at Powersoft have always trained young people in PB and set them off on a career with that skill set. Ironically our major competitor has sourced their staff from our pool of trained staff. In recent years we have not trained any new staff but have trained our existing staff who are long standing and have been with us for decades. So our competitor has lost their source of young fresh talent.

We have been talking about us training staff for them, we are also looking at starting up our training program and employing some young people to build our skill set. This is the only way we can fill the skills gap.

The problem is and always has been that companies are not prepared to invest in people and train them. This has always seemed a very short sighted approach, which is why we have and continue to train people. I believe in this approach so much that I am prepared to train staff for our competitor as I believe that you get out what you put in to the system.

I do not think having a free to play with version will help generate skills we need to push our employers to train young people to support PB. We need to develop other people skills, the whole PB community needs to focus on this and work coherently together to meet the challenge.

I agree with the way you thing and present your thoughts.

A community version (or express) is a constant request, and it was also in original plans made by Appeon, but it was later removed. Personally I do own and pay a License for my self (I do work in a company but I prefer to have my own license to experiment). One thing that Appeon did well when originally took control of Powerbuilder development was to offer pre orders to a really low cost. But after that I don't remember any other offer for powerbuilder licenses (while for PowerServer I do). In the meantime Standard, which had the most affordable price was discontinued. Also a big emphasis was given to PowerServer (which is a good product and may have a great future). But PowerServer is "tied" with cloud version of Powerbuilder, and I believe there are lot of clients who work with Professional.

Now, with PB 2022, they seem to pay more attention to PowerBuilder and this is good. But the investment is still big. 895 for PB professional (+VAT) may be to much for an individual who wants to learn the technology... And this price must be paid every year. This is a problem. So the only chance to see young people learning powerbuilder is to wait them to get a work where they will have to learn it...

I also wonder how much future may this have...

Andreas.