The Porter Method

Happy New Year to one and all.

I hope everyone has big plans for the coming year. Just be sure you haven’t gotten too comfortable where you are in life. You should never stop learning, never stop enjoying new experiences, and never stop having fun. Life is way too short to just sit there comfortable in your situation.

Hopefully this year I will be adding lots of new technical content, so stay tuned. If you are in the Java fold, the JavaOne Call for Papers is now open. Get your submissions in before the 1/31/2005 deadline.

Also, 2004 is over. The W2’s and other tax documents should start pouring in. If you are going to be owed a refund, file as soon as possible. Uncle Sam has been partying on your excess tax money all year, so be sure and get it back. You need it more than the government anyway, they’ll just spend it.

News flash, DailyAccess Corporation written up for Sybase Success Story. The IT department at DailyAccess Corporation had the distinct pleasure of being interviewed for a Sybase Success Story detailing the work we have done using Sybase products to advance our business processes.

The summary of the article has been posted on the Sybase website and a longer version should be posted after the New Year. I will post a link when I get it. There are some nice quotes from yours truly, Doug Porter, praising the Sybase products we have worked with. For us this is the PowerBuilder development language and the EAServer Application Server. I encourage you to read the article and leave me a comment with any feedback you may have.

Sybase makes some wonderful products and has one of the best user communities and some of the best newsgroup participation I have seen. If you have had the pleasure with working with any of their products you know what I’m talking about.

Merry Christmas. I hope you are all on the Nice list this year.

If you have never heard of the amazing Butch Walker, you are really missing out. Butch Walker first got some publicity from his band The Marvelous 3. They had a great radio hit in the mid-nineties with “Freak of the Week”. Their body of work is some of the best rock and roll I’ve ever heard. Their albums were great, but nothing compared to their live shows. Butch and the rest of the band put on an amazing show. Few bands are able to get the crowd into the show like Butch and his bandmates. Even if you had never heard their music before, you would have a blast at their live shows.

Butch has now gone solo (in addition to being one of the most sought after producers in the business, producing the likes of Avril Lavigne, American Hi-Fi, Sevendust, The Donnas, SR-71…). His first solo effort Left of Self-Centered was a great rock extravaganza reminiscent of his days with The Marvelous 3. His sophmore effort Letters is a much more emotional introspective work, but it still has an edge and fantastic musicality that is awesome.

Butch is currently on the road touring for Letters. He just finished a gig opening for Avril Lavigne on her tour and is now on his own tour with American Hi-Fi. If he is coming anywhere near you, you really should check him and the Hi-Fi out. His stage presence is a must-see. He will definitely be the standard which you compare other live shows to after seeing him. I happened to be lucky enough to be in Orlando last August (speaking at Sybase’s TechWave 2004) at the same time he was playing The Social, a local club. Amazing show. I would be traveling back there to see him in a couple of weeks if I could, but unfortunately a wedding falls on the same day. So hopefully Butch will hit the road again after the first of the year.

Give him a listen if you get the chance.

Oh PowerBuilder where fore are thou market share? For those that do not know, Sybase’s PowerBuilder was the it thing in the mid nineties. During the Client/Server rage PowerBuilder was one of the first on the scene that provided this capability.

Unfortunately as we have seen time and time again, getting there first doesn’t always mean that you will become or stay the most successful in a market. As competing technologies from Microsoft and Sun played catchup throughout the late nineties, PowerBuilder started to lose market share. During the internet boom Microsoft and Sun had very deep pockets that allowed them to throw massive amounts of money at development and marketing. It really seems that they bought their market share by marketing the public to become convinced that their technologies were the ones to develop on.

I came to PowerBuilder fairly recently (~2 years ago) at PowerBuilder version 8. The die hards out there remember PB version 1. I had worked in all of the Microsoft languages and also Java. While they were quite good and allowed me to do some amazing things in development, I was shocked when I was introduced to PowerBuilder. Or I should say I was shocked to discover one of the main features of PowerBuilder. The object known as the DataWindow.

For those that do not know, the DataWindow is an object which allows one to very rapidly create forms and reports based on SQL queries. It is the closest thing to black magic I have seen in a long while. Lets compare it to say classic VB.

Say we want to create a form which allows us to perform all of the basic CRUD operations on a table containing employees with the following columns (ssn, firstname, lastname, address1, address2, city, state, zip).

VB World:
First we create a form with text boxes for each of our columns. We add a datacontrol to the form that has our selection query from the employees table. Then we must link each text box to its appropriate column. We must add buttons and then actually write the code to perform the insert, update, delete operations……and on and on and on… too much work.

PowerBuilder using the DataWindow:
Create new DataWindow object based on our query (select * from employees;) The DataWindow automatically generates a form for us prepopulated with input fields for each column in our table. We set the form up so that it is visually pleasing to us. We click Save. Done. You now have full CRUD capabilities from our datawindow. The DataWindow object full encapsulates the functionality for Executing our query, Deleting Records, Inserting new records, and Updating records. Pure brilliance.

Now Sybase has quite a few things going for it when it comes to PowerBuilder that I hope will move things back towards the way things were:

• Many Legacy Applications – There are many applications in Government agencies, Financial institutions, and the Insurance industry that are written in PB. Porting them to a new language is a major undertaking
• Incredible User Community – I have not seen a community more devoted and involved in spreading the good word of PowerBuilder than the Sybase community. From an amazingly active set of newsgroups forums.sybase.com to their very own set of “Super Users” called Team Sybase to the formal user group ISUG
• PocketBuilder mobile development environment – the pocket version of PowerBuilder has been turning quite a few heads. It has the power of the desktop application software in the compact form.
• DataWindow.Net – realizing that MS had made some serious inroads on the development community, the power and wonder of the DataWindow has been ported to function as an object in the .Net environment

I am quite pleased with the success of PocketBuilder and DataWindow.Net. I think that these two things could really bring PowerBuilder back to the masses in a huge way. Always nice to see that the skills one has put time in to gaining maintain their importance in the technology market. As a certified PowerBuilder 9 Developer working here in Alabama I look forward to PowerBuilder getting the credit they deserve for creating fantastic tools that allows rapid application development.

If you have never checked out PowerBuilder. Take a peek at the Sybase webpages linked here. You will be amazed at what it can do. Feel free to leave me comments with your thoughts.

Through The Amazing Scoble I have found that Scot Finnie has done a review on Firefox that is fantastic. He points out all of the wondeful things that makes Firefox the best browser out there right now (in my humble opinion of course).

If you have not checked it out, go grab it at www.getfirefox.com. Once you have experienced tabbed browsing, you will never be able to go back. (Plus it is just a ~4.5 meg download so give it a go)

The Mozilla group also has an e-mail client that is quite good called Thunderbird. I said goodbye to Outlook at home and have started using it with an IMAP account at www.runbox.com and am quite pleased so far. The things where I see it lacking currently are in the works (mainly better Calendar support is what I’ve noticed so far along with some quirks when using it to read newsgroups). But a very good client nonetheless.

Also if anyone has some recommendations for a newsgroup reader let me know. I use Outlook Express and haven’t found anything else that fits the bill as well as that. You can usually find me lurking over at forums.sybase.com in the PowerBuilder and EAServer groups.