If there is one technology that will define and decide PowerBuilder's future it's Distributed PowerBuilder. Yes, I am sure that you've had your share of what Sean Rhody calls 'Middle-Tier Madness'. So I am not going to give a sermon on what distributed computing is and why you need it. With all the hype surrounding it, and I honestly feel that some of it is unjustified, I am sure that you have figured out the basics by now. So let me just give you the bottom line here - like it or not, the Future is Distributed. Till recently, talk about distributed computing had been just that. Not many companies were really 'doing it'. But lately things have changed a lot. The number of applications 'going distributed' grows everyday. Hence this article.

From A to Z

And what can you expect from this article? The basics of developing and deploying real life Distributed PowerBuilder applications. No, I do not delve into the theoretical basics of PowerBuilder's distributed computing capabilities. There is plenty of material that does just that - teaches you a bunch of objects and functions and then abandons you to figure out for yourself how the hell everything fits together.

Instead, I assume that you have already experienced this frustration, are familiar with the theory, and are now ready to get down to the nuts and bolts of a DPB(Distributed PowerBuilder) application. In this article I intend to take you through all the important phases of building a DPB application. From strategy to deployment. Step by step. From A to Z.

I'll use an example application to explain the process. For this purpose, I'll use the done-to-death example of updating the 'employee' table. You can download the PowerBuilder 6.5 code from here. The example application connects to the PowerBuilder Demo DB V6 database.

Introduction

Strategy
Building the monolith
Building the DPB Server
Building the PB Client
Setting up the DPB Server
Deploying the PB Client

Points to Ponder
Where to go from here

 Download the application

What's Next?

Related Links:

Middle Tier Madness - A Sean Rhody PBDJ editorial

Distributed Development with PowerBuilder 6.0

From Here To The Enterprise - Distributed, Component-Based Applications.

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