Characteristics of PowerBuilder

Characteristics of 1.2 PowerBuilder

PowerBuilder provides support for most of the currently popular relational database management systems, because the database access part of the PowerBuilder application generally uses the Internationalized standard database query language SQL, Applications developed with PowerBuilder can be used on different backend database management systems without modification or minor modifications. That is to say, the application developed with PowerBuilder is independent of the database management system on the server.

Like most Windows applications, PowerBuilder is also an event-driven way of working. In this way of working, the program runs without a fixed process, and the code in the program is written for a variety of possible events, and when the program starts running, it can accept events triggered by the system, users, or other applications, and then execute the appropriate event code. Event-driven work is closely related to object-oriented technology, and in PowerBuilder applications, it is often the various visual objects in the program interface that accept the events that occur.

PowerBuilder is an object-oriented development tool, and windows, menus, controls, and so on in a variety of windows-based applications are objects in PowerBuilder. We can also create our own user objects in PowerBuilder. It is particularly important to note that PowerBuilder provides full support for the various technologies in the object-oriented approach, and we can use the encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism of objects in object-oriented methods to make the applications we develop have great reusability and scalability. This is an important goal for applications in software engineering.

At present, due to the development of network technology, many different operating system platforms are used at the same time on Internet, which puts forward higher requirements for the cross-platform development of the application, and PowerBuilder provides good cross-platform, for example, in PowerBuilder, The various objects developed with the Windows platform can be easily applied to UNIX platforms because PowerBuilder supports the cross-platform nature of objects. This makes it less complicated to move applications from one platform to another.

In order to provide support for all aspects of the user, PowerBuilder has its own programming language PowerScript, which provides a basic flow control statement and provides hundreds of functions to manipulate objects and provide support such as dde,ole. In addition, we can define our own functions to handle specific events. A considerable part of the time spent learning PowerBuilder is used to understand and become familiar with the various functions provided by PowerBuilder.

A great feature of PowerBuilder is that the concept of Data window object is presented. The Data Window object is also an object type in PowerBuilder, which differs from other objects in that the Data Window object is specifically designed to access the database service in the background, in which we define the source of the data and the display style of the data. So in the application we can focus on the process control of the program, not the source of the specific data, because we have already defined the source of the data in the Data Window object. If you need to use different data in the database, just modify the Data window object. In particular, PowerBuilder provides a wealth of data display in the Data window object to meet a variety of needs.

The Basic class library PFC is provided in the newer version of PowerBuilder, which provides many reusable predefined classes and objects for application development, using basic class library PFC to quickly develop high-quality, reusable applications. Really exert the great power of object-oriented programming.

Finally, there are three different versions of PowerBuilder, the desktop type, the professional type, and the enterprise type, and the desktop type is a desktop application for personal use, Here you can use the PowerBuilder built-in database management system Sybase SQL anywhere to create and use a local database for personal application services The most important point of the professional PowerBuilder is to provide support for Microsoft ODBC (Database Standard connection interface), in professional version we can use PowerBuilder inheritance, Most of the features of polymorphism; The most important point in the enterprise version is that it provides comprehensive support for developing large database applications, as well as a number of supporting tools for developing large applications, such as C + + CLASS Builder.