IDC White Paper: Sybase PowerBuilder: A Tradition of Productivity Evolved for Modern Developer Ecosystems

Revolutionary at its inception for defining and popularizing this specific genre of distributed application development, the PowerBuilder 12.5 development environment today combines functional maturity with aggressive modernizations that keep it a viable and compelling tool for tackling business applications. Sybase PowerBuilder has remained throughout the years a bastion of application development productivity for a wide class of enterprise applications that combine database access with a highly productive graphical user interface (GUI). The strategic direction taken by the PowerBuilder team has meant that the product can now be considered equally viable for evolving existing applications and for developing new ones. In particular, Sybase PowerBuilder provides the following benefits:

A mature and highly functional application development environment that is currently in its sixteenth major release. Since its inception in 1991, PowerBuilder has aggressively evolved to meet customer demands for new architectures and technologies.
A highly productive development paradigm for rapidly constructing both the back end and the front end of an application. PowerBuilder features the highly acclaimed "DataWindow" metaphor with native support for multiple popular database management systems as well as a graphical approach to painting the user interface screens and components of an application.
A powerful, yet easy-to-use scripting language, which has been kept current to support modern language features and techniques that permit the construction of business logic tying the user interface to the enterprise data.
An articulated strategic direction to snap PowerBuilder to the Web ecosystem through the support of HTML5 technology for GUI development that will make the product appealing to one of the largest and most diverse developer ecosystems.
The solid backing of Sybase, a financially stable and healthy concern that has provided strong stewardship of the PowerBuilder asset with an intimate customer interaction model. The backing is made even stronger by the acquisition of Sybase by SAP, which, according to IDC, is the fourth largest software company in the world.

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