History
PowerBuilder was originally developed by PowerSoft in 1991. PowerSoft went public in 1993 and was acquired by Sybase for $904 million in Sybase stock in 1995. The product languished for a long time due to several reasons:
- Sybase's stock plummeted in 1996 after discovery of inflated sales reports, and many members of the original PowerSoft development team left Sybase.
- Competition from rival tools for building GUIs to databases, such as Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Access and Delphi, reduced PowerBuilder's market share.
- PowerBuilder was slow to move to the Web: long after rivals began to support Web development, it continued to be based on two-tier (traditional client-server) technology. Two-tier approaches, while allowing more rapid development, are inherently less scalable than N-tier solutions (such as Web-based database solutions). In a two-tier solution, there must be one connection to the database for each concurrent user, whereas with N-tier solutions, which incorporate connection-pooling technology, a limited number of database connections - sometimes, just a single connection - are multiplexed among a much larger number of actual concurrent users. While two-tier applications continue to be used (appropriately) when the number of users is modest, they are inappropriate for, say, E-commerce scenarios. Also, deployment of two-tier solutions, including management of software updates, is significantly more complicated: Web-based solutions require only a browser on the user's machine, and the latest version of the application's Web pages will always be available.
PowerBuilder 12, through compatibility with Web technologies such as ASP.NET, represents an attempt to regain market share. In order to move developers to newer versions, PowerBuilder 12 provides migration utilities that attempt to simplify migration .
Read more about this topic: Power Builder
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