
PowerBuilder History, Powersoft History (2004) - neuro
http://lannigan.org/powersoft_powerbuilder_history.htm
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byron_fast
Powerbuilder divided biz software developers into two camps: the smart people
who hated because it was too opinionated and confined, and everyone else who
understood that business results were what mattered.

Powerbuilder offered ROI like nothing else in that era if you needed custom
software in your business.

It's interesting that the currently-hot idea of Entity Framework was the core
advantage of Powerbuilder with the Datawindow. It still feels like the web is
catching up to Powerbuilder in some ways.

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geoelectric
While I'll definitely give PB credit for being one of the first, Delphi and VB
gave it a run for its money in the custom business software space.

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eweise
Maybe but Powerbuilder's components made it far more productive in building
business software than VB.

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digitalsin
PowerBuilder was so far ahead of its time and did so many things right.
Microsoft pretty much ripped the datawindow concept early on in .NET's life
with datasets, but didn't get it nearly as right as PB did (in the beginning
anyway).

Pity they don't open source the thing and maybe some life could be breathed
into it.

~~~
pjmlp
Given that Visual Basic had it first, how come Microsoft ripped it off for
.NET?

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digitalsin
VB had the concept of a recordset, which is like a single dimension of a
dataset.

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jason_slack
I spent 6 months moving 13 Microsoft Access apps to Powerbuilder equivalents.
We went from daily problems to I could actually enjoy my morning cup of tea.

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gshulegaard
Oddly enough as someone who graduated with a Bachelors in 2013, I never would
have thought I would have had hands on experience with PowerBuilder. But my
first job out of college was a company that sold a product built in
PowerBuilder and they hired me to do some work to gradually phase in newer web
technologies. Said employer actually paid to have a PowerBuilder
consultant/trainer come in and give me (and some others) on site training. Of
course by this time SAP already owned PowerBuilder.

To be honest, I don't hate it. It wouldn't be my first choice as a tool, but
it really wasn't bad. It certainly made trade offs...but I can't remember any
time I thought a design decision was "terrible".

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y0ghur7_xxx
We still have some legacy PowerBuilder apps running today, and I am
responsible for one. I still have to change some things in the app from time
to time.

PowerBuilder is (was) an extremely powerful rad tool. The datawindow still has
no rivals for crud operations on data and for reports.

The web has taken over, but the productivity this tool gives you is nowhere to
be found in the modern dev stacks.

~~~
neuro
I agree, nothing is close to PB's datawindow CRUD operations. As for GUI
component development in Windows, same goes for Delphi's VCL, I still haven't
seen anything close to it yet.

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dhodges
I spent 4 or 5 years doing Powerbuilder apps, both for an Enterprise employer
and as a consultant. I grew to know it inside and out, which made for a
valuable skill for a while. But, as the article said, the web came along, and
I hardly noticed when I closed up my Powerbuilder IDE for the last time.

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yolo1
I worked with Powerbuilder for a year around 2012 as a junior. I have pretty
fond memories of a completely broken workflow UI/UX. The project I was working
on was an in-development replacement for a COTS COBOL application for use
within a nieche market. I was just happy to land my first development job, but
there were some alarm bells going off given the application hadn't had an
initial release, some 10 years after development officially began.

The IDE view would allow you to select a function to view / modify via a
dropdown list - it wouldn't jump to the section in code but be roughly similar
to the usefulness of a one-function-per-file methodology might seem in Visual
Studio, but without the Ctrl+Tab.

That in itself wouldn't have been completely horrible if you could actually
navigate while the previous buffer had invalid code, or just had an
intellisense equivalent that actually worked. Alas, if you couldn't remember
some function or global variable name you'd need to comment out enough code to
get the file into a buildable state in order for you to use your mouse to
select the appropriate item from the function dropdown list in order to view
the relevant section of code elsewhere within the same class file.

There was also inconsistent build behavior, I gather most compiled languages
contain reference errors or similar when performing incremental builds but
this fucker would actually fail mid build for no apparent reason - load it
back up and rebuild the same stuff and it'd all work fine. It wasn't my
computer, all devs had similar issues across multiple operating systems and
minor revisions.

The application itself also had a crazy inheritance (think WYSIWYG objects
with 8+ ancestors) and event hierarchy (pre-event, event, post-event. pre-
save, save, post-save) which I think was sortof an immature OO and GUI ideals,
implemented poorly. In powerbuilder terms this meant that not only did I have
400 events in my dropdown list of stuff that I can't access unless I create
massive code blocks, but there was a second dropdown containing an equally
crazy inheritance hierarchy with 400 functions at each level.

Oh, also don't forget that functions do not implicitly call their ancestors,
but events do (or was it the other way around, I've tried my best to block
this out of memory).

Needless to say, I bailed for greener pastures, I've since lost contact with
everybody there but occasionally I check their website - they added some
screenshots of the new application sometime in 2014 but I still can't find any
indication it's actually sold to clients. I'm sure there are people out there
that say Powerbuilder wasn't that bad, but personally I'd rather code in VB6.

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farnsworthy
"It was an offer like no other offers. The groom asking for Powersoft's hand
in marriage was Sybase and the billion dollar dowry offer was very seductive.
So a wedding/merger was arranged on February 13, 1995. I hope they took
pictures during the wedding ceremony and honeymoon because the "paper
valuation" (the deal was done with Sybase stock—worth $904m) didn't last long.
The bad news arrived in the form of fabricated (Sybase) sales results. Sybase
stock took a tumble, along with the fortune of many Powersoft executives..."

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rukuu001
Whoa, flashbacks!

One of my first jobs as a grad was to build a telnet interface into a PB app.
Fun times.

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hawkesnest
Too bad it's basically dead at this point.

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yenwel
I hate powerbuilder with a passion.

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flukus
Care to elaborate? There's apparently some powerbuilder work in my near term
future and I have no idea what to expect (good or bad).

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ethbro
From the general feedback I've gotten & my own experience, the summary is --
people hate bad PowerBuilder apps.

In the same way they'd hate bad apps written in any other framework.

PowerBuilder's honest biggest problem is that it was likely used by internal
and consultant teams looking to quickly deliver value, sometimes to the
detriment of solid architecture decisions. And that the resulting applications
have been useful enough that people are still running them (without updates) a
couple decades later.

