Deploying Powerbuilder to web

With applications moving to web and now mobile, powerbuilder was expected to lag behind. Thanks to Appeon, who made sure Powerbuilder stays in the race. With Appeon, we can deploy the application to either web or mobile.

Appeon helps us continue to write the code in Powerscript but deploy the application in either J2EE or .Net. What appeon does is convert the Powerbuilder objects into JScript, html and xml. The files can be packaged and deployed to client environment.

But, migration does not comes so handy. There are functions, syntaxes etc which are not supported by appeon eg GetCurrentDirectory(). Appeon has its own functions which can be used as a replacement. They do have a very good support team who are always available to tackle the issues.

With the budgets and time to convert PB to Java or .Net going so high, I think appeon is surely an option application owner can think of.

Debugging Web Services in Powerbuilder

Fiddler is a free Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data.

If we are working on Web Services in Powerbuilder, Fiddler will help us trace the request and response xml. Below is an snippet of Fiddler Request and Response xml. 

In the image below, Add is a function name in WSDL file. a and b are two columns in web service datawindow. The value assigned to a is 20 and b is 11.

The AddResult parameter is response received from the web service being called.

Web Sessions

Web Sessions pane is where the traffic is displayed as it is captured:

• # - An ID# of the request generated by Fiddler for your convenience
• Result - The Result code from the HTTP Response
• Protocol - The Protocol (HTTP/HTTPS/FTP) used by this session
• Host - The hostname of the server to which the request was sent
• URL - The path and file requested from the server
• Body - The number of bytes in the Response body
• Caching - Values from the Response's Expires or Cache-Control headers
• Process - The local Windows Process from which the traffic originated
• Content-Type - The Content-Type header from the Response
• Custom - A text field you can set via scripting
• Comments - A text field you can set from scripting or the session's context menu

·         The icons on the left hand side next to the ID give you more visual information about the session: