Appeon Future
As time passes and PB’s future seems darker and darker, I couldn’t help but wonder what would be the future of Appeon if PB gets EOLed. I might be wrong, but I believe that Appeon only works with PB. If that is the case Appeon’s future isn’t much brighter that PB’s future.
Thinking about this gave me an idea to save PB (and Appeon): bundle them together and sell it as one product. That would make PB capable of targeting any platform.
Well .... that´s it ???? No news about it ? No official position from SAP about PB future ?
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AUS Julián Tagarro
NeoSistemas SRL
I only noticed one change yesterday: Free Reviewer's Copy of SAP Sybase PowerBuilder 12.6 is now available for ISUG Gold Members. I successfully downloaded a copy and plan to try it with Appeon 2013 R2 which is also available for gold members. So something is going on, far from enough though. Wish someone from SAP could say something here.
Hi Jun;
1) Appeon 2013R2 will not work with PB 12.6.
- There is a new release (Appeon 2015) coming soon that will be PB 12.6 compliant
2) The free edition of Appeon benefit for ISUG-Tech Gold/Core members expires at the end of September, 2014.
Regards ... Chris
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the info. I got an email about the availability change of Appeon for gold members of ISUG only an hour ago. I think ISUG should notify their members a little sooner than that. There are only a few days left, so if anyone out there is a gold member of ISUG, act now and get a copy of Appeon. I happened to install a copy of Appeon 2013R2 a couple of days ago, and has just activated my license. No license expiration, limits to 5 sessions&devices. More than enough for trial and demo! It's a great product!
Regards,
Jun
Hi Chris,
As I am a Gold Member, how exactly do I go about getting the Appeon License, please?
Paul
Hi Paul;
1) Log into ISUG-Tech
2) Select "My Options" DDLB from the top right part of the web page
3) Select "My Benefits"
4) Scroll down to "Additional Benefits"
5) Select the "Appeon for PowerBuilder 2013" link
- which should really read "Appeon 2013 for PB" 😉
6) Select "Review the Information Here" link
7) Follow the instructions carefully from that point
HTH
Regards ... Chris
Also, PowerBuilder 12.6 trial version is now available on the SAP store: http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/powerbuilder/blog/2014/09/23/powerbuilder-126-eval-available
About the Appeon LinkedIn group: I tried posting something there a week ago, saying that I was struggling with limitations and wondered whether anyone would like to look at the list of issues I had encountered and comment on them for me. It never appeared, and I did not receive anything from the moderator of the group telling me that they had chosen not to post it or why. Somewhat disappointing!
Dan, the Appeon LinkedIn group is NOT moderated. I'm not sure why your post didn't appear immediately. At any rate, if you have tech issues please contact technical support or if you are not an existing customer please contact your sales rep to get some free support.
I just checked the Appeon Developers LinkedIn group again and my post certainly never appeared. I guess it's possible I did something wrong but I can't really think what.
I did raise a number of cases with APPEON support related to the various questions I had about limitations etc., and eventually unfortunately decided that there were just too many limitations and concerns to go ahead with APPEON. It's still an amazing product, but it seems I was just unlucky in hitting the small percentage of unimplemented PB features in my application, and being perhaps overly concerned about hard-to-find incompatibilities (like the documented different semantics of NULLs in JavaScript vs. PowerScript).
I'm currently working on a "Plan B" for what I'm calling a "cloud storage" version of our main installed PB application, extending the existing Internet backups facility we had built to instead download the Internet backup every time you start the app, and re-upload a new backup every time you exit, with added control to prevent simultaneous users. If anyone would like to add their thoughts on how that would work, I'd very much welcome the input! The blog post is at http://donationusers.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/web-proposal/.
Hey dan,
About plan A:
I agree that finding the nulls was probably the biggest headache in getting appeon to work with my application. I can't speak to the incompatibilities you refered to, but i know i also had to make changes to work around the differences.
Perhaps you should create a new post here to ask those questions to the group and ask how others handled some of the issues that you face.
Thanks for the suggestion M Searer. I'm afraid that ship has sailed. We had a long list of concerns, including the price (our software is very inexpensive, so adding Appeon would have required us to charge 2 1/2 to 3 times as much annually for it as we do for the current installed version!).
Also the lack of support for the Other event was a killer, because we use a COM-controllable PDF printer to print mail-merge letters from an embedded IE window, and we need the Other event to know when those prints have succeeded, or alternatively catch errors.
And those are just 2 out of over 20 concerns (some admittedly less major).
If you are looking for an easy way to update your app remotely then I have a suggestion. My app PBSearch checks all the files at startup and will download changed files from my website. You can download a sample app with an upload tool that uses FTP to upload files.
Look for PBUpdater on this page Topwiz Software - Tools.
Ok no comment for a while but I think I know why SAP has forgotten about / lost interest in PowerBuilder.
Its HANA River IDE or RDE as they call it.
Any thoughts?
They are looking at developing a Web toolkit which can churn out RDL (river definition language) similar to javascript. Question is, will they use PB as a platform for generating RDL? This is similar to Appeon generating javascript from PB. Wonder why they are reinventing the wheel when they can readily take advantage of Appeon and it's fantastic code generation capabilities. Looking from another perspective, i still cannot buy the idea of Web applications replacing every darn thing that can be run in a desktop. Web development is atleast five times less productive and less user friendly compared to 4GL tools. If you ever coded in javascript, you would get what i am saying. Javascript is not a developer friendly language and we need a higher abstraction like PB to churn it out. Again, why would you want to churn javascript when you can might as well code natively to machine code which is faster and more responsive and let you do a lot of cool things which web development does not allow.
Hi Armeen,
Someone posted that they posted to the L i n k e d I n Appeon Group and could not find their post. I just posted and it says that the post is pending manager approval.
See attached screenshot.
Best,
Paul
This is not our intention. We will look into this and fix immediately.
It has been fixed. Sorry about that.
Thanks Armeen!!