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John Hnat
- PowerBuilder
- Monday, 7 January 2019 09:22 PM UTC
Hello everybody,
My question is for ISVs who have current products based on PB. What are your plans moving forward?
Are you planning to investigate PB2018 (or, I should say, PB2019) to leverage your existing code in C#?
Are you going to continue developing in PB for the time being?
Or are you/have you already started rewriting your applications in a different language?
Here's our situation. We're a U.S.-based ISV, about 300 employees, growing like crazy. We produce accounting software for the construction industry. Our flagship product is a PB-based client-server app with roughly 6,500 clients scattered around the country. Probably 80% of those client are premises-based; the rest are SaaS (or, really, Desktop-as-a-Service; we use Remote Desktop to allow them to launch the application; so while it is nominally browser-based, it really isn't).
Fortunately, we have a pretty good moat around our product -- excellent reputation in the industry, not a lot of competition, high barriers to entry. But management is concerned about the flagship product's long-term viability. Some of it is of the "what happens if Appeon goes away" variety, and some of it is "is the day ever going to come when we must absolutely have a true web-based application" variety.
In recent years, we have developed ancillary pieces to our main application; those have been web-based C# applications. We are also developing some brand-new applications, also in C#. To that end, we've added dozens of C# developers over the past few years (we still have about 15-18 PB developers). So C# is going to be a big part of our future no matter what.
But the question is what to do with our flagship, giant (~ 3 million lines of code and thousands of DW objects) PB application. A rewrite from scratch would be a giant undertaking; although there is some support within management to start over in C#, the larger sentiment seems to be "let's exhaust every possibility for using/re-using what we can from the existing PB code."
So that leads us back to the question: what are the rest of you ISVs doing? What are your plans?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts -- I'm hoping that this question leads to a good discussion.
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