JULY-AUGUST 2009 23

Essential PowerBuilder Series: Online Training For Sybase PowerBuilder 11.5

The need for training and skills development has never been higher than it

is right now and technical staff of all levels realize that if they want to earn more, then the best way to do so is to learn more. eLear-nIT Training’s latest web-based training courses for Sybase profes-sionals everywhere offers a wealth of resources that are fine tuned for the exact needs of contemporary working environments.

Live Classroom Quality Experi-enceYakov Werde, the author of this course and president of eLearnIT, has a proven track record in teaching PowerBuilder to professional audiences. Continuing along in that tradition, Mr. Werde is directing an organization whose goal it is to produce high quality study materials in a self-paced format that offers an always available, live classroom quality experience for a frac-tion of the price of on-site training

Coupling the quality of the con-tent with an ISUG-hosted learner sup-port forum, every student will receive a real web 2.0 learning experience. This classroom quality experience is enhanced even further by the fact that Mr. Werde provides audio narration and descriptions to convey the lectures with clarity and coherence.

TRAINING REVIEW

Course ContentEach module is presented in an ap-pealing format that draws the student inward. As a company, eLearnIT has clearly examined not only the in-ner workings of PowerBuilder as an Integrated Development Environ-ment (IDE), but also the mechanics of teaching and the way in which people download and absorb information. This training course is (as its makers claim) sets out with a “soup to nuts” approach that will be appealing to college-level student developers and to more experi-enced professionals alike.

Consisting of seven core modules, eLearnIT latest PowerBuilder training course also includes an introductory ses-sion to allow the student to get a broad brush overview of the subject areas that they are about to cover. The seven core modules are as follows: • 01 IDE Skills and Concepts• 02 PowerScript Fundamentals• 03 GUI Basics• 04 Object-Oriented Programming• 05 DB Connectivity and Embed-

ded SQL• 06 DataWindow Technology• 07 Deploying An Application

Along with each lectured section of this course, there is a Mini Quiz as well as a Mini Lab. This course also incorporates Post Unit Lab Exercises to provide a “Hands on Coding Experi-

ence.” By performing these Post Unit Labs, a student cumulatively builds a complete workgroup scale application from project initialization on through to deploying the completed applica-tion. With all these features, the ‘user interaction’ element of eLearnIT Training’s product is brought to the forefront and a better overall learning experience is guaranteed.

Additionally, the course’s authors always take the time to explain how long each section will take before you start.

Rather than describe every slide in every section of every module, we will now give you a general overview of the content in each of the seven core modules.

01 IDE Skills And ConceptsThis section sets out to instruct on the use of the PowerBuilder IDE and its graphical tools to search, examine and navigate an existing application’s code base with an eye towards understand-ing how the application is put together. Students will learn how to perform development environment initializa-tion and configuration activities to start coding in an existing or new applica-tion.

This unit is broken out into two topics including IDE Skills and Devel-opment Methodology Foundations. The first topic addresses the crucially

Editorial Review

03 GUI BasicsThis module is logically focused on windows and menus in order to teach the student the skills needed to configure, navigate and use the Window Painter facili-ties to layout and configure window forms containing visual controls for use in data entry and display.

Also, at this point in the training course, the author wants the student to gain an understanding of the layers of the functionality provided by both Microsoft and Sybase.

From extremely basic concepts upward, this section describes how there are multiple code layers beneath a

24 ISUG TECHNICAL JOURNAL

02 PowerScript FundamentalsThis section of the course approaches the fundamentals of using the PowerScript language. It is broken out into six sub sections each of which contain a Mini Lab coding exercise and Mini Quiz.

ESSENTIAL POWER BUILDER SERIES

PowerBuilder 11.5

PowerBuilder 11.5 blends new and emerging technologies into the most vigorous data-driven development tool, allowing developers to rapidly create mission-critical client/server, distributed, Web and Smart Clients applications for JEE, Win32, and .NET platforms. An award-winning favorite for nearly two decades, PowerBuilder, continues to empower developers to deliver reliable business applications that offer high-quality and fresh user experiences. The latest version of PowerBuilder brings .NET interoperability enhancements, DataWindow innovations and many other new capabilities to make your job even easier, your

applications even more robust and your development even faster.

important IDE coding aids and navigation skills that all users must master in order to use PowerBuilder. Each item is dem-onstrated and explained in a set of videos that are embedded in the graphical interaction of the course.

The second topic provides extremely detailed informa-tion on Workspaces, Targets, Libraries, Library List, and Application Objects so that developers are equipped with all the IDE constructs that are necessary to work on a new or existing project.

Mini Lab coding exercises to reinforce the student’s knowledge of PowerScript Language Characteristics

In roughly 90 minutes of content, this section shows you at first hand how the knowledge you have already acquired in the classroom is applied in real world coding scenarios.

This unit’s learning objectives are to teach the user to code business and utility local logic as global user functions in the PowerScript language, using the integrated PowerScript editor and according to the directives in a design specification

Multiple Code Layers

Simply click on an information icon to view an embedded video detailing the selected IDE Element

document. The six topics covered in this unit module are:1. Language Characteristics2. Navigating the PowerScript Editor3. Identifiers, Data Types and Scope4. Operators and Expressions5. Statements6. Global Functions

It’s worth noting here that PowerScript is a 4GL language that is highly productive. Wikipedia states the following in reference to the language and its relationship with Power-Builder. “The PowerScript language supports Object-Orient-ed features of Inheritance, Polymorphism, and Encapsulation, but does not support importing from DataWindow, which is the main window that applications use. PowerScript does not require the use of these features, however, this gives develop-ers the power of OO with the flexibility to develop using one’s own strategy. Some developers use a framework, such as PowerBuilder Foundation Classes (PFC), and from it, inherit all objects such as windows.”

ESSENTIAL POWER BUILDER SERIES

JULY-AUGUST 2009 25

PowerBuilder window and a window control. PowerBuilder controls are high productivity veneers, which wrap and extend MS native SDK controls. Their presence makes Pow-erBuilder a highly productive Windows coding environment.

After initial concepts and overview and a look at “The Window” (as we know it today) and its properties, the course moves on to talk about controls and their properties before focusing on design techniques and finally wrapping this sec-tion up by looking at configuring user navigation.

There is also a quite detailed description of PowerBuilder PBUs. The size of PowerBuilder units (PBUs) is quite simply defined in terms of logical inches instead of as a fraction of the size of the system font. The size of a logical inch is defined by the operating system in question as an exact number of pixels. PowerBuilder PBUs are in fact the units used for the design of windows, visual user objects and when needed, DataWindows themselves.

Other topics covered here include Sequential Keyboard Navigation and Random Keyboard Navigation, the later coming into relevance when developers want to construct a properly designed GUI that provide a keyboard equivalent for every pointer navigation action.

04 Object Oriented ProgrammingAs readers will know, object oriented programming is simply defined as a programming language model organized around “objects” rather than “actions”. Object oriented program-ming is also organized around data rather than logic.

This section is devoted to teaching students the funda-mentals needed to use the PowerBuilder IDE and its graphi-cal tools to implement dynamic behaviours and application logic in any given GUI in an object-oriented manner. This unit also examines the logic behind Dynamic Programming (the heart of the object oriented programming paradigm), which consists of coding program logic in discrete self-con-tained elements. Rather than approach program logic in a static code environment, Dynamic programming will always instruct the runtime to load an element into memory at just the appropriate time.

05 DB Connectivity And Embedded SQL

In order to given students the best possible overview of database connectivity and Embedded SQL issues, this section shows the user how the PowerBuilder IDE and its graphical tools can be used to establish a development time con-nection to the DBMS, how to write robust PowerScript code to connect an application client to a DBMS and finally, how to code embed-ded SQL statements in an event handler and display the results in the GUI.

A pictorial representation of the Instantiation Process

A Coding Database Connection Flowchart

Training And Tuition With Quality And Pedigree

Fronted by one of the most recognized and revered PowerBuilder educators of the last decade - Yakov Werde - eLearnIT’s “soup to nuts” PowerBuilder Core Skills training course enables professional software developers as well as second year Technical College IT students to rapidly develop a comprehensive PowerBuilder skill set.

“eLearnIT has developed an innovative online delivery mechanism for its educational courses that IT professionals will find intuitive and easy to use,” said Mike Harrold, Executive Director for ISUG. “Coupled with eLearnIT’s extensive PowerBuilder knowledge, the courses to be of-fered will be comprehensive, market-relevant and extremely affordable due to their web-based delivery mechanism.”

“We believe that one of the major causes of the acute shortage of skilled PowerBuilder developers in the market today is the lack of cost effective, high impact core skills training” said Yakov Werde, President of eLearnIT, LLC. “Current global economic conditions makes taking five days off from work, while paying thousands of dollars in tuition and travel expenses for live classroom training off the radar for most organizations’ employees.”

eLearnIT’s flagship training product employs current rich media tech-nologies, formulated from more than a decade of experience in training thousands of new PowerBuilder developers.

Product Availability And Pricing

The first PowerBuilder course is available to ISUG members now. Pric-ing begins at US$699, with premium add-ons available for an additional cost.

For more information, visit www.isug.com/pbtraining

Additionally, this section covers referencing and how to use the PowerScript editor to declare instance variables on a class. Also covered here are a few basics such as events, methods, event broadcasting and encapsulation.

26 ISUG TECHNICAL JOURNAL

07 Deploying An ApplicationThis section sets out to arm the developer with more Pow-erBuilder essentials. Given a coded client application and a target client desktop system, after completion of this module, the developer should be able to select deployment configu-ration options for the target environment. The developer should also be able to use the Project Painter to input deploy-ment configuration choices and build an installable deploy-ment unit.”

SummaryWorking closely with ISUG, eLearnIT has produced a compelling and clearly presented product that is attuned to PowerBuilder in situ. That is to say, this course will teach you how to use PowerBuilder in the context of the way it is applied in modern development and data shops. It addresses the type of development issues that PowerBuilder users will typically come across and you can almost feel like the course’s author has tried to reach out and win the hearts and minds of his audience.

Each module is presented in a compelling and intuitive format that is sure to hold anyone’s attention span for the duration. Building logically from one step to the next, the complete offering presented here is impressively laid out with a professionally slick look and feel. The content is presented with candor and openness so that the student will know which sections will be more challenging than others.

Upon completion of the core course, a developer will be capable of building their own PowerBuilder workgroup scale application from scratch or performing maintenance tasks on an enterprise scale application.

We can say no more without you physically taking the course and feeling its benefits – and once you’re done here, you can go on and take the advanced course.

ESSENTIAL POWER BUILDER SERIES

DataWindow Object Painter Quiz to reinforce the students knowledge of PowerBuilder’s DataWindow Technology

“As a software engineer for over a decade, I have attended numer-ous technical training courses. I’ve been instructed in classrooms by vendors, in-house employees and 2nd-party consultancy firms. I have also taken many CBTs, webinars and web-based training. In comparison to my other courses, I would definitely give the eLear-nIT’s PowerBuilder training excellent marks.

Having plenty of software and IDE experience, but absolutely no exposure to PowerBuilder, I found the training to be extremely easy to follow. I thought the training modules were presented in very clear and coherent fashion. Likewise, I enjoyed the quizzes, and I am certain that they helped reinforce the key points. The labs were beneficial in promoting the actual interaction with the IDE which is ultimately what a person would want to become proficient in.

I thought that all topics covered were relevant to the course although I found some slides to be almost too basic and elementary for me. Thankfully, the course was cleverly designed such that I could use the convenient course player navigation controls to easily skip over these topics and replay those topics that I found to be more challenging.

Given the fact that I reviewed a pre-release version of the course, there were a few hiccups in the training videos; however, eLearnIT has already reconciled these discrepancies in a posted upgrade, which I have, in fact, verified.

Consequently, based on my overall observations, I suspect that this training program is all a person really needs to become a master at PowerBuilder.” – Teresa Foster, Java Developer and ISUG Technical Consultant.

06 DataWindow TechnologyGiven that the DataWindow technology is the key ingredi-ent that makes PowerBuilder the champion of data-centric application development, this section is especially important as it drills down into the core of the technology. This sec-tion defines, illustrates and details the individual role and collective interaction of each element in Sybase’s patented DataWindow technology. Furthermore, with much detail, this unit explores transaction processing and the interaction between the DataWindow and the Database in a highly concurrent environment.

A Student’s Opinion

There are some core fundamentals to take on board here such as a description of the fact that PowerBuilder was designed from its inception to be an open platform. In this way, an organization could choose its DBMS independent of its choice of client application tools. There are also some areas of essential advice on establishing a database connec-tion; students are told at this stage that connections need to be both global as well as persistent. Learning this truth now is the best way to go forward.