PowerBuilder Conference Content

Here is a little information on some of the great  content that will be discussed at the conference in March 2014!




Implementing InfoMaker Reports into your PowerBuilder Application (Calvin Allen)
Let’s face it – getting data back out of your system is just as important to your users as anything else. We can run into major issues, though, trying to fulfill all the reporting requests and provide application-level functionality. If you’re lucky, your clients will have individuals that have experience authoring their own reports.
In this session, I’ll demonstrate how you can leverage that experience from your clients using InfoMaker, so that their custom reports can be integrated into your application with ease!

A Hands-On Look at the PB Ultimate Suite (Calvin Allen)
Does your application have a ‘dated’ look to it? Does it give you a frowny face when you look at it? Worry no more, the PB Ultimate Suite is here to help!
In this session, we’re going to take a look at the various components offered by the PB Ultimate Suite (developed by Brad Wery of Werysoft and distributed by Novalys), and discuss how you can get them implemented into your application with no fuss that will turn that frown around!

How to integrate OCR technology into your PB applications (Chris Pollach)
Many PowerBuilder applications have access to scanned images that have been saved in various Data Base Management Systems as “binary large objects”. These images might be created by PowerBuilder, VB, Java applications or captured by specialized back-end processes for further processing, auditing, security checking, record keeping, etc purposes. Digital images of various business forms, documents, correspondence and adhoc datum can be a treasure trove of information to be mined. There are also a plethora of Optical Character Reading software on the market today that can unlock this digital information and provide comprehensible text reflecting a image’s contents. There are also some open source and therefore free OCR software solutions that exist as well.
This seminar will explore the world of OCR software and how you can enable these from PowerBuilder. Especially focusing on the free open source solutions. The seminar will show you how to integrate OCR technology into your front-end image capture PB applications for data validation, how to mine images using back-end PB processes and then how this same OCR technology can tapped by the new Appeon Web and Appeon Mobile technologies as well.

Developing Appeon Web and Mobile Applications using the STD Framework (Chris Pollach)
The Software Tool & Die (STD) Foundation Classes for PB, Appeon and Web Services provide a comprehensive, cohesive and accellerated productivity development framework for the Appeon developer. This in depth session (hands-on workshop) will guide the PB developer through the architecture of the framework, its adaptation, use, services, performance & tuning and deployment considerations when building industrial strength Web and Mobile applications.
The STD Foundation classes have been developed over many years since 1993 and have been used by many government and private organizations. The STD Foundation Classes latest “Integrated” framework version incorporates the best code orginally developed for PB, PocketBuilder EAServer, IIs, Winforms, WCF, Webforms, etc and now fully optimized for Appeon Web and Appeon Mobile as well.

How to integrate Imaging Technology into your PB applications (Chris Pollach)
Many PowerBuilder applications have access to scanned images that have been saved in various Data Base Management Systems as “binary large objects”. These images might be created by PowerBuilder, VB, Java applications or captured by specialized back-end processes for further processing, auditing, security checking, record keeping, etc purposes. Digital images – like structured data – need to be managed and possibly further enhanced to meet business requirements. These image enhancements may include such things as cropping, d-skewing, rotating, flipping, redacting, enhancing for readability (ie brightness, contrast, colour saturation, etc) to name a few. The PB application may also need to ascertain the image metrics or read the “meta” data from inside the image to be able to make better decisions on the image’s contents or disposition.
There is a plethora of Imaging software on the market today that can unlock and manipulate this digital information. There are also some open source Imaging software solutions that exist as well. This seminar will explore the world of Imaging software and how you can enable these from PowerBuilder. Especially focusing on the free open source solutions. The seminar will show you how to integrate Imaging technology into your image capture or post-processing PB applications, how to manipulate images using back-end PB processes and then how this same Imaging technology can accessed from the new Appeon Web and Appeon Mobile technologies as well.

Consuming a ‘Modern’ Web Service using COM (Matt Balent)
Matt Balent will demonstrate how to create a C# .Net proxy to handle web service communication and then expose its methods via COM for use in a PowerBuilder application.

Integration of Google Maps into a PowerBuilder Application (Gloria Szilasi)
Demonstration of new UI design concepts to break away from the ‘old school’ PowerBuilder look and feel along with simple integration of Google Maps API to create a visually appealing and useful application.

Advanced PowerBuilder Programming Techniques (Robert Sisk)
This session will cover techniques to enhance the GUI and performance of PowerBuilder applications. The following concepts will be discussed:
dynamic control spacing
user defined datawindow cell coloring
rounded datawindows
animating icons on the toolbar
XML caching techniques to speed up datawindow retrieval
user defined datawindow grouping

Using C# and PowerBuilder .NET to create server-side DLLs that can be called from an Appeon application (Mark Bemis)
Appeon applications can call .NET DLLs on the Appeon server using the AppeonDotNetComponent object. This session will show how C# functions called from Appeon can call functions in other .NET assemblies, PowerBuilder .NET NVOs, and Win32 DLLs.
Existing PowerBuilder business logic can be implemented on the server in PowerBuilder .NET assemblies. Database connections and retrieving/updating data in the database using DataStores is supported. A custom NVO manages connection caches to multiple databases.
Win32 DLLs which you don’t want to deploy to the end-user workstation can be placed on the Appeon server and called using a C# wrapper function.
Simple data types can be passed as arguments from the client to .NET using the AppeonDotNetComponent call. Values can be returned from .NET as the function return value or using reference arguments. Large data is passed between the client applications and the server using blobs in the database.

Using a PowerBuilder application to build Business Applications with no Programming (Mark C. Jones)
Our clinical trials software (Clindex), available as a PB Classic or Appeon application, is designed to allow our customers to build their own complex data entry screens, reports , navagations and interfaces to support their clinical studies. However, the design of this software allows for the creation of more than clinical study data collection, but allows users to develop robust internal applications with no programming. For example, our own software’s functional requirements/software requirements/test cases and testing are tracked and collected using this software.
In the session, I will show examples of the flexibility of this software and the concepts used for creating such a system including the use of tag functions for navigation, global functions to allow user DataWindow extendability, data dictionary driven data entry screens comprised of multiple parent/child DataWindows and dynamic DataWindow filtering allow multiple filters of the same DataStore be displayed in different DataWindows on the same page. In addition I will show the built in SQL interface that auto labels coded data, allows creation of descriptive statistics and auto-drill down to data related screens.

Windows COM: System Integration Super Glue (Yakov Werde)
Yakov Werde will explore using Microsoft COM as a desktop integration technology to extend the life and reach of PowerBuilder desktop applications. After briefly surveying PowerBuilder’s current state of affairs, Yakov will introduce COM technology and PowerBuilder’s capability as a COM client. He will descend into technical details, exploring COM internals, the mechanics of exposing a .NET assembly via COM InterOp and details the nuances of PowerBuilder’s COM client interface.

A new approach for creating Reports (Gian Luca De Bonis)
This session will Introduce a new Report Maker for PowerBuilder applications. This innovative solution does not require Technical/SQL skills to build reports. Leveraging the Appeon technology, new reports are instantly made available to Windows, Web and Mobile clients. The solution has been designed for software vendors and large organizations that need to let business users manage their reports themselves.

Introducing Visual Expert 7 (Christophe Dufourmantelle)
This new generation of maintenance tools has been entirely redeveloped to better support large/complex applications. This presentation will introduces new collaborative features, allowing several developers to share the same code and exchange the result of their analyses. This new version supports impact analysis across multiple applications, generating a source code documentation on a scheduled time, a new GUI, and a lot of new features. Additionally, VE 7 installation and application scanning walk thoughs will be conducted as part of this session.

Modernize your application’s security (Christophe Dufourmantelle)
Technology evolves quickly, as do security requirements and user expectations.
This presentation is based on visual Guard 5.1 and shows how to do the following:
Allow users to identify themselves using their Windows, Facebook, or Google account.
Completely separate business logic and security logic in order to evolve security rules quickly and without making changes to the code.
Delegate security management to help desk, business administrators or even clients (SaaS).
Keep track of sensitive operations performed by each user within the application (auditing).

 regards ... Chris