PowerScript, the language of PowerBuilder, contains many hundreds of functions, and, now that I am drawing near to a decade of working with PowerBuilder daily, I can brag that I am at least familiar with all of them. Most flow from my fingertips without my giving them a second thought. I still have to look up a couple of them, but, by and large, I know every single one.
Now there is the PowerBuilder Foundation Classes (PFC). This product doesn't take the place of PowerScript. My knowledge of the functions of PowerScript has not suddenly become obsolete. Instead the PFC adds several hundred more functions to my toolkit. I looked at this massive collection of objects and functions and realized that I was in trouble. It wasn't enough that there was so much new information to learn. Powersoft was making serious progress in distributed programming and super thin and thin client programming. I had to learn all this and didn't have a clue as to how to start.
I began with what looked the easiest. I studied distributed programming. I wrote test applications that ran on two machines. I wrote an application that ran on three different machines.
I studied the Internet Developer's Toolkit. Once I had written one application that used plug-ins and one super thin client I felt much better. At least I had a handle on this technology as well.
When I felt I was ready to dive into the PFC, I opened the Help file and read all about it. Then I clicked on the online books in Help, located the CD, and then started reading ... and reading ... and reading. Each day when I came home from work I would pick up where I left off, for hours on end.
Finally I came to the end of the online books and thought that now I could write something. I ran PowerBuilder and started a new application. Then I realized that I had forgotten how to start. So I ran Help, then the online books. Then I had to take out the CD that was in the drive, and locate the online books CD. After I found the CD and inserted it I found that I had forgotten where I had put the instructions for getting started. Finally, after numerous false starts, off I went.
My days became repetitious. I learned to be very careful about where I put my CD so it would be easy to find. I learned to bookmark places in the CD
I kept going; finally my application was finished and it worked! I decided to venture a PFC application at work although I was still dependent on the CD. But at my work all CDs are turned in to the network people for proper storage. At my request it was mounted on a central CD server somewhere in the bowels of the building.
Immediately a dozen programmers started reading the CD. It was so slow that I couldn't use it.
That's when I decided that I would go home at night and work on lists of functions and objects. Since I was doing this just for myself I could organize them in a way that made sense to me. It didn't matter if I listed the same function in ten different places. If that's where I needed it, that's where it went. I could use my word processor to search for the function that I wanted. I separated things by object and by function.
Soon my document was more than 100 pages, complete with diagrams, too big for a single file. It was at this time that I answered an ad in a newsgroup to review a book by Tim Hatton. This introduced me to Manning Publications, Inc. Which led to this book.
As I write this it is ten months since the start of this journey. My initial little collection of tables has grown immensely. I obtained a beta copy of PowerBuilder 6.0 and added as much of that as I could. Now I realize that this is a process that will never end. By the time that you have this in your hands I will be looking for another beta copy of PowerBuilder with a whole new set of objects and functions for the PFC. Odd how things turn out, isn't it?