What is PowerBuilder?
PowerBuilder, sometimes abbreviated PB, is a computer application development system created by Powersoft, which was later purchased by Sybase. Marketed as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) system, it includes tools for drawing the user interface and reports, and accessing database content. The tools are provided in an integrated development environment that is the application developer's interface to the capabilities of the system
PowerBuilder has a native data-handling object called a DataWindow, which can be used to create, edit, and display data from the database. This object gives the programmer a number of tools for specifying and controlling user interface appearance and behavior, and also provides simplified access to database content. To some extent, the DataWindow frees the programmer from considering the differences between Database Management Systems from different vendors.
PowerBuilder also includes a scripting language, PowerScript, which is used to specify the application behavior when events occur. Events usually correspond to user actions, such as clicking on an element of the user interface, or closing a window.
As of July 2007, the latest release of PowerBuilder is version 11. It includes DataWindow.NET, which is a .NET-enabled version of PB's DataWindow control. It includes ASP.NET 2.0 Web Forms application capability.[1]
PowerBuilder 10 and above use Unicode internally. This allows the use of characters from multiple languages concurrently. This affects the coding of API calls, however, the upgrade from PowerBuilder 9 to 10 automatically converts your existing API calls for you. Therefore, in PB10, you have a choice of making ANSI or Unicode API calls at the call level. PowerBuilder 10 supports reading and writing to flat files larger than 2 GB. PB9.0 supports the TRY CATCH FINALLY syntax of error handling. PB 10 has a built-in date-picker control.