PowerBuilder for a Java programmer?

Question

A friend of mine uses in his company an ERP software written in PowerBuilder. Unfortunately the (one and only) developer is going into retirement soon. My friend really likes the software and wants to keep using it for at least ten more years, so my friend decided to buy the source code.

He wants to start a business to maintain the software and develop new features. At the moment there are probably about 50 installations of that software out in the wild and he already knows of a bunch of potential buyers.

Now he's searching for a developer and asked me... I did a little C/C++ programming, a bit of VB and a bunch of other languages but in the last years I earned my money by writing Java web applications. From what I read, PowerBuilder looks quite antiquated to me, there are hardly any tutorials out there, no open source frameworks, awkward version control, didn't even read about any test frameworks. People here on StackOverflow say they hope, the language/IDE is dead. Additionally the code I'd maintain is completely undocumented and untested.

Do you think it's possible, for someone who never even heard of PowerBuilder before, to maintain such a software?

EDIT: okay, thanks for your answers. We decided to kick the old application completely and re-write it in an up-to-date-language.

Answer 1

Yes, it's possible. Powerbuilder is not a hard language to pick up, particularly if you have used VB already.

The Powerbuilder community is far smaller than what you may be used to with e.g. Java, but it does exist. The best place (other than SO!) to ask questions are the sybase.public.powerbuilder.* newsgroups.

For unit testing, try PowerUnit, and for source control, you can use Subversion via PBSCCProxy, TamTam SVN SCC, or PushOK SVN SCC proxy.

It's been a niche language for a long time now. In my opinion this is due the upfront cost of the tools required, which is essentially blocking anyone new from considering it.

The future is reasonably bright though: Sybase is flourishing, committed to PowerBuilder, and regularly announcing progress towards version 12, which will be a full .NET language like C# and VB.NET, and will ship with an IDE based on VisualStudio. You will be able to directly migrate your code to version 12, no rewrites required.

Answer 2

I started my career as a PowerBuilder developer, but quickly changed to java and python, as soon as I realized PB was almost a dead language.

Also, even if there are tools that can be used to apply programming "good practices", they are not widely known and somewhat expensive, so I've had to work even without version control (!!), left aside automated testing or continuous integration.

It is a language in which almost anyone can start to build usable apps in a short period of time and with little training, and the apps are built really fast, in contrast with java, that demands a period of learning until a developer can be productive, and even then, a webapp takes time to be developed.

But the payback is with maintenance, that quickly becomes a nightmare. Even a minor change in the database like a type change in a database column can destroy every datawindow (the PB ubiquitous data-access component) that refers to it.

It's pretty much similar to VB, in that as almost anyone can develop applications in it, with very little programming knowledge, the average quality of applications is very low, with unmanageable database coupling and plagued of bad coding practices.

My advice is not to build a Developer career in such kind of language unless the money justifies it, and in that case, continue training yourself in alternative technologies as a "plan b" to not become obsolete along with the language.

And always work to keep your coding and problem solving skills "in good shape" as this kind of language does not help in that.