PWB503 - Managing the Evolution of Your PowerBuilder Applications with Visual Expert

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PWB503 - Managing the Evolution of Your
PowerBuilder Applications with Visual Expert
Christophe DUFOURMANTELLECEO- Novalyscdufour_at_nov
alys.net08.07.03
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INTRODUCTION

• Sybase is introducing a new product in on the
  American PB market. This product is dedicated to
  extending the life of PB applications.
• Why did Sybase choose this product?
• Understanding the PowerBuilder market
• What kind of services does it provide?
• Daily situation solver

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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
I.I A Worldwide Survey

• In order to understand todays PB market and its
  future evolution, a worldwide survey was
  conducted on PowerBuilder in 2002

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I.II The surveys purpose structure
I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
Purpose of the survey

1. The past few years has seen the emergence of
   Internet/Intranet architecture in IT systems. It
   is important to evaluate the current PB market,
   and how do users plan to use PB in the future?
2. Sybase has been increasing the technical and
   marketing effort on PB for the past two years.
   What is the impact of these efforts on PB users?

Structure

• Different questions were asked to more than
  4000 developers from all over the world to
  evaluate the importance of PB in their
  environment.

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Where are PB developer from? 
I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
I.III The 2002-2003 PowerBuilder Survey

• American developers are widely represented
  in this survey, which makes this
• survey valid for studying the US market
  trends.

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I.III The 2002-2003 PowerBuilder Survey
I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
What is the size of PB teams?
PowerBuilder was used by projects of important
size (departmental projects or company projects).
This trend is confirmed. The average size of
development teams reaches 12 people. More than
half of the teams count between 4 and 20
developers
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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
I.III The 2002-2003 PowerBuilder Survey
How long will PB be used for? 

• PB will be used for a long time 79 believe they
  will for more than 2 years !
• The US forecast is very close to the one in other
  countries such as in Europe or Asia.

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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
I.III The 2002-2003 PowerBuilder Survey
Is PB used on existing applications, new
applications or both?

• All developers stated they work on existing
  applications, which is not a surprise if we
  consider that PowerBuilder has become a mature
  tool.
• The proportion of users who intend to develop new
  applications with PowerBuilder remains important
  almost 60 !

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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
I.III The 2002-2003 PowerBuilder Survey
Which mark out of 10 is given to PB? 

• PowerBuilder is an excellent tool whose users are
  satisfied the average mark is close to 8/10.
• More than 80 of the users gave him a mark higher
  than 7/10.

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I. UNDERSTANDING THE PB MARKET
I.IV What can we conclude from this survey?

• This search shows the impact of PB will remain
  strategic in IT departments in the following
  years, teams are still sizeable.
• The bigger the application, the more it lasts,
  the more it is difficult to make it evolve.
• Many strategic applications are still daily
  developed with PowerBuilder.
• There is a need for these applications to be
  maintained and enhanced.

Therefore, Sybase chose to introduce a solution
named Visual Expert to help in maintaining and
developing existing PB applications
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II. MAKING LIFE EASIER
II.I Which situations are we targeting?

• The maintenance and development of existing PB
  applications often leads to a variety of
  hindrances, take time and efforts to solve and
  bypass.

Situations involving Application Knowledge
Management
When someone joins a project they need several
months to master the application.
1. Joining a project
When an application is transferred to another
group, there is a high cost in time and effort to
transfer the knowledge.
2. Knowledge transfer
3. Leaving a project
When someone leaves a project they take their
knowledge with them.
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II. MAKING LIFE EASIER
II.I Which situations are we targeting with this
product?
Situations involving the modification of an
application

• Every modification has the possibility of
  creating unexpected side effects

• To avoid side effect issues, each modification
  should first be validated with an Impact Analysis.

• When an Impact Analysis is done manually it is
  time consuming and might be incomplete.

• Often there is not even the time available to
  conduct this analysis.

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II. MAKING LIFE EASIER
II.II Who and How

• Who does it concern?
• Sooner or later, everybody in the IT
  department is concerned.
• How are we going to go about it?
• Taking different examples of daily situations
  every development team meets
• and showing the appropriate solution for such
  situations.

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1- MODIFYING A COLUMN
1.1 SITUATION
2. MAKING LIFE EASIER

• Scenario
• A modification was made in the database
• For example, the size of a column has changed.
• This column is widely used by the PB application
  (in Datawindows, embedded SQLs, etc..)

• Questions
• What is the impact of this change on the
  PowerBuilder application?
• Which Datawindows and script are referencing this
  column?

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1. MODIFYING A COLUMN
1.2 PROPOSED SOLUTION

• The tables and columns referenced by the PB
  application are listed
• The modified column is selected (product.name in
  this example)
• An impact analysis is performed
• It shows which component is using this column.

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2.MODIFYING AN UNKNOWN COMPLEX WINDOW
2.1 SITUATION

• Scenario
• A user requests a modification in a complex
  window.
• You never worked on this window and your only
  specification is a screenshot with a note.
• For instance, the name of a button should be
  changed urgently because the clients find it
  confusing (see next slide).

• Questions
• Which object corresponds to the screenshot?
• Which control corresponds to the button I should
  modify?
• Once defined, what is the impact of the
  modification?

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2.MODIFYING AN UNKNOWN COMPLEX WINDOW
2.2 USER SPECIFICATION
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2.MODIFYING AN UNKNOWN COMPLEX WINDOW
2.3 PROPOSED SOLUTION

• A string search lists several objects that could
  correspond to the window to be modified
• The right window is identified using graphical
  previews
• The control to be modified is directly located
  from the window preview

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3. MODIFYING AN INHERITED WINDOW
3.1 SITUATION

• Scenario
• The application is based on a large framework
• A windows attribute needs to be modified.
• This attribute might be inherited from an
  ancestor window
• Of course, you dont know about the window to be
  modified or the Framework

• Questions
• Is the attribute to be modified inherited from an
  ancestor ?
• If so, from which ancestor object?
• Should you modified the attribute in the
  ancestor, what would the impact on the rest of
  the application be?

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3. MODIFYING AN INHERITED ATTRIBUTE
3.2 PROPOSED SOLUTION

• The attribute continue_action should be
  modified.
• The left arrow means it has been inherited from
  an ancestor window
• Where is this attribute defined?

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3. MODIFYING AN INHERITED ATTRIBUTE
3.2 PROPOSED SOLUTION

• The attribute is defined in an ancestor named
  pfc_w_master
• A descendant hierarchy shows many windows
  inheriting from this ancestor.
• Its probably not such a good idea to modify the
  attribute directly in the ancestor!

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4. GENERATING SOURCE CODE DOCUMENTATION
4.1 SITUATION

• Scenario
• The development or maintenance of an application
  is transferred from one group to another.
• There is no source code documentation to help on
  transferring the knowledge.

• Questions
• How do you produce immediately a support that may
  help for knowledge transfer?
• How do you easily update this support in case of
  modifications in the code?

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4. GENERATING SOURCE CODE DOCUMENTATION
4.2 PROPOSED SOLUTION

• Any time, you can generate automatically a source
  code documentation.
• A wizard propose several options to customize the
  result.
• HTML format is recommended for on-line reading.
  Word is used when the documentation has to be
  printed

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5. CLEANING UP UNUSED COMPONENTS
5.1 SITUATION

• Scenario
• The application has been developed for years by
  several different developers.
• Each version of the application has generated
  unused components.
• The application has become quite large. It is
  time to clean up the code and get rid of this
  dead code.

• Questions
• How do you list such unused items?
• How do you check that each item is truly not
  used anymore?

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5. CLEANING UP UNUSED COMPONENTS
5.2 PROPOSED SOLUTION

• Global variables and functions are sometimes
  forgotten when the code is modified.
• Removing the unused ones will simplify the
  application maintenance

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5. CLEANING UP UNUSED COMPONENTS
5.2 PROPOSED SOLUTION

• Same for every type of objects (windows,
  datawindows, userobjects, etc.)
• It might be tedious and difficult to find such
  unused components, especially if they have been
  developed by someone else.

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III. SYBASES CHOICE

• With Visual Expert, Sybase provides PowerBuilder
  Developers a solution to deal more easily with
  heavy applications they have to maintain and
  enhance regularly.