The results of the latest poll by Novalys on PowerBuilder use are in. The results are good. A lot of people are still using PowerBuilder and intend to continue to do so for some time. An increasing number of those are using PowerBuilder to do new development work, rather than simply maintaining existing applications. The number of developers on a particular project has increased over previous years.
What I found particularly interesting is that the majority of people are using PowerBuilder versions 8 and 9. Only slightly over 1% of the respondents indicating they were using version 10. Perhaps Unicode support was not as important as was first thought. Hopefully, version 11 will offer some more compelling reasons to migrate. Note that one-half the respondents indicated they will upgrade in the next year, so that may indicate people moving to version 10, just not that quickly.
2 comments:
You said "The results are good. A lot of people are still using PowerBuilder and intend
to continue to do so for some time"
Sounds like it is slowly dying? Isn't it?
You also said "What I found particularly interesting is that the majority of people are using PowerBuilder versions 8 and 9. Only slightly over 1% of the respondents indicating they were using version 10."
I think the main reason for that is not the new compelling features of PB but the need to upgrade database drivers and other "middleware" in particular needed support for Oracle 9i and 10g.
Unless PB10 and only PB10 supports Windows 2003, "2005" or Oracle "11" there is no need for PB10 upgrade. As you could see in the report PB is used mostly for client/server applications where it is best and in that area the product looks completely stagnant in the past 5-7 years. Just look at PB graphs, they haven’t changed since PB2, look at composite datawindows, you still cannot have basic master/detail report without doing fancy things with non-composite datawindow, grouping, dynamic objects and so on… No new controls have been really added since PB5. Menus still cannot have decent toolbars with non-menu linked objects (like drop-down) and there are no options to have graphics in menu items I mean lots of very basic things have NOT been updated in conventional part of PB for ages.
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