Mobilize Blog

Casamba is a national leader in providing electronic medical record (EMR)  enterprise software to skilled nursing facilities, outpatient therapy clinics, contract therapy providers, and home health and hospice agencies. Founded in 1997, Casamba's products are used by more than 275,000 providers across the United States.

Last week was Microsoft's annual developer conference aka Build. Three days of total software geekitude: Azure, IoT, .NET, Visual Studio, and even a doggie petting zoo. Yes, your modern developer apparently gets so stressed out at a Microsoft conference that they need to rub a Golden Retriever's ears to calm down.

I just finished reading a white paper from a highly-respected technology company about their definition of application modernization. Their definition of application modernization is "repackaging" legacy applications for "more agility" including some "cloud native" features.

 Launch day! At least it is in Redmond where the Visual Studio team is celebrating the launch of VS 2019, and no, it's not an April Fools joke (that was yesterday).

Welcome back. If you've been reading along, in Part 1 and Part 2 we talked about what PowerBuilder DataWindows do, how they are used, and the challenges of modernizing PowerBuilder DataWindows to native web apps.

In Part 1, we reviewed the nature and popularity of PowerBuilder DataWindows, and yes PowerBuilder was pretty cool back in the day. But so were leisure suits. Now, however, nobody is birthing new PowerBuilder developers so it makes sense to get off it. And since the core of a PowerBuilder app is lots of DataWindows, I want to show how WebMAP can migrate PowerBuilder DataWindows to a modern web app.

The DataWindow object is the cornerstone of PowerBuilder application development. PowerBuilder apps are largely designed around accessing databases, typically for CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. In fact, most business applications--especially legacy client/server applications--are forms over data: screens contain a host of data-bound controls designed to build queries against database tables, return results, and allow for CRUD updates.

Recently one of our account executives asked me an interesting question. He had been contacted by an ISV who was slogging through a rewrite of a very large (millions of lines of code) VB6 app to .NET. And like many if not most companies who attempt rewrites of very large applications, at some point the pain, cost, time, and risk began to be largely untenable and they began investigating tools to address the problem. 

Almost done.

(Note: this is the part 3 in a four part series--if you're just starting here I would urge you to go back to Part 1 and 2 and read them first.