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Friday, May 9, 2014

Appeon Web - How Does It Work

Appeon Web

How Does It Work?

 

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  I was just putting together some information and slides for a presentation to my fellow coworkers on the high-level technical architecture that Appeon Web uses to webify any PowerBuilder Classic based application including ones built using the PowerBuilder Foundation Classes (PFC)!


   The main interesting aspects that I am always amazed at with the Appeon Web product are things like: removes the PBVM dependency, builds re-entrant & multi-threaded code, converts your 2 tier application into a 4-tier model, builds full 32 or 64 bit compliant code, includes its own Data Access Layer (DAL), supports all the popular DBMS systems (now including mySQL & HANNA), supports all the popular application servers, can deploy your PB application using either a J2EE or .Net architecture, provides its own security mechanism or allows you to integrate with LDAP, incorporates system monitoring, supports fail-over & load balancing, etc. To me .. that's a "whole lot of bang for the buck" when it comes down to adding up all the features you get right out-of-the-box!


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   Appeon Web automatically converts your PowerScript code and objects into C# / Java, jScript, XML and HTML. It needs to do this in order to support the web paradigm, as follows:

  • Web Browser: The Web browser delivers and runs the presentation layer of the Web application.
  • Firewall: Port 80 is supported to comply with corporate security requirements.
  • Web Server: The Web server hosts the presentation layer components for the Web application. The presentation layer is comprised of a set of HTML, XML, java script files and an ActiveX run-time library. The Browser and Web Server exchange information using standard web protocols.
  • Application Server (Java or .NET):  hosts the business and data access logic for the Web application.
  • Database: Existing DBMS & application databases used by the Web application.

Appeon Developer

   The Appeon Web product is actually delivered and utilized in various components. The first key component is the "developer plug-in" which integrates seamlessly into the PowerBuilder Classic integrated development environment.


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   Appeon Developer integrates seamlessly with the SAP PowerBuilder Classic IDE. Developers can rapidly deploy existing PowerBuilder applications to the Web or build new Web applications without having to write any HTML/JavaScript or Java/.NET code. Developers can utilize existing PowerBuilder constructs, user interface, DataWindows, PFC, and PowerScript.

Appeon Server

Appeon Server provides key services that make the web applications come to life and extend their high performance nature, as follows:

  •  Database Connectivity
  •  Data Access Management
  •  Transaction Management
  •  Session Management
  •  Web Applications Management
  •  Server-side Integration like calling Web Services, .NET components, Java components, etc.
  •  Security Management
  •  Load Balancing
  •  Fail-over
  •  etc


  The Appeon Web product allows the PowerBuilder developer to continue to use the IDE that they are most productive in and extend that into the web world by incrementally generating the web components that are needed and deploying these seemlessly as the programmer codes and saves their PB objects! Once the application is ready to test in the IDE, Appeon is also ready to test the web version ofr that application using the n-tier architecture of the web.

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  As you can see in the above diagram, as the PB developer saves objects into any of their PB Libraries - Appeon Web translates that work into the language of the web and deploys the related components to their respective server(s).




  You can give the Appeon Web system a try by downloading the trial version from Appeon. For those of you who are ISUG-TECH members at the Core (previously called "green") or Gold level, you can get the Appeon Web "developer" version for free as part of your membership.

Give Appeon Web a try .. you will be amazed at what it can do and why you did not try it sooner - Chris!


Regards ... Chris

2 comments:

  1. This is a great summary of Appeon, but it does gloss over the fact that there is often a lot of work to be done to make an application function correctly using the Appeon platform, as many common PowerBuilder functions are unsupported.

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  2. You are correct in that for "some" PB features the code around them may need to be refactored in order to be Appeon compliant. In other aspects like PDF generation where Appeon provides its own internal PDF engine and things like native printing support within the web browser, 64 bit, multi-threading, no PBVM required, etc ... its "heads" above PB's webforms (which is now EOL).
    In my personal experience with converting older existing PB applications to Appeon the refactoring effort is 5-10% of the overall conversion effort to get to production.

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