Franck Fasolin

What made Web application development initially so successful was that Web applications looked pretty. They usually included graphics made by graphic design experts. What makes them so unsuccessful nowadays is that they provide a very poor user interface. End users understood that being pretty isn't as important as being easy-to-use and they want the best of both worlds. This is why we're moving back to client/server application development with .NET Winforms technology. We now say "rich client user interface" to be politically correct. But this is still client/server application development and we have the best client/server application development in PowerBuilder. We saw in Part One of this article that we don't have to install any software on the client computer to run a PowerBuilder application (except for the database driver that can be auto-deployed by your sy... (more)

HTMLBridge - Generate Web Application From PowerBuilder Client/Cerver Application

Back in 1997, I was working on Riverston's HOW UML CASE tool, which was able to generate a full PowerBuilder application from adapted UML diagrams. This tool doesn't exist any more, but it showed us that there were other ways to explore application development with modeling, UML technology, and PowerBuilder. It just seemed to me that Sybase was missing something else in order to adapt PowerBuilder for Web application development. Back then, Web application development was largely limited to static pages on Web sites; Microsoft had only just introduced the first version of their ASP... (more)

Moving Your Client/Server Application to Your Intranet

Many developers tell me they have to move their PowerBuilder client/server applications to the Web to deploy them on their intranet. In most cases, this is not useful. It just seems that the marketing people at Microsoft did such a good job we're forgetting that we don't need Web technology to deploy our PowerBuilder applications on our intranet. One of the features that made PowerBuilder so successful was that is was so easy to deploy PowerBuilder client/server applications. You just put your pbls and the PowerBuilder VM in a shared network directory and that's it! The only trou... (more)