The topicality of PowerBuilder

[Andrea Guidi]

#113159

The topicality of PowerBuilder
LinkedIn newsletter March 16, 2023

The release of PowerSoft PowerBuilder in the early 1990s took the world one step further in management applications. The decoupling of server programming from the interface was becoming popular.

The latest versions of database management systems offered the solution to the server side, but a client graphical interface development tool that could be easily integrated with the data paradigm was missing.

PowerBuilder’s patented datawindow answered this need well and PowerBuilder dominated the scene in America and Europe for a long time.

In those years Softpi was introducing Sybase SQL Server in Italy and collaborated with PowerSoft for PowerBuilder. Together with Elea Olivetti, we organized a series of seminars for Italy entitled – which at the time sounded like a novelty – “Databases in Client/Server Architectures”. With a technical slant, some experts told the state of the art of the two C/S sides of the coin, the main examples were precisely with PowerBuilder and Sybase. Among the speakers Aurelio Della Croce, Professor Andrea Tommasi of the University of Pisa, Carlo Vaccari of the Melograno Data Service, I had the happy task of introducing and presenting. Between Rome, Milan and Padua we had hundreds of participants, all insiders.

In 1993 PowerSoft was acquired by Sybase Inc. and the evolution of the product continued rapidly for the first few years, then there was probably a slowdown. Years later, in 2010, the acquisition of Sybase by SAP arrived, which supported the product above all to keep it compatible on the Windows platforms that followed and consolidated it in version 12.6. In 2019 with a very large installed base of tens of thousands of developers, SAP finds in Appeon and its president Armeen Mazda the best partner to grow the technology again.

Today, for example, you can create Cloud applications in Docker Containers, we have the functions to consume and create RESTful Web APIs and by maintaining a single code we can have the application in client/server and web architecture with PowerServer.

With Sally Li as Marketing Manager, we have evidence that PowerBuilder with Appeon keeps getting better over time, and so her customers can continue to build the best business applications, with a minimal amount of resources.

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