Arthur Hefti

Keeping information away from curious eyes is a challenging task. For example, you might need to encrypt data before sending it over the Internet. Or you might be storing some information in a database that not even an administrator is allowed to see. This article provides a brief overview of encryption techniques and shows how to do encryption in PowerBuilder. Short History Encryption goes as far back as ancient Egypt. In 1900 B.C. the Egyptians used a derivation of standard hieroglyphics to make a message more difficult to read. The art of hiding messages improved over the centuries. The early Greeks used a combination of wooden sticks and leather ribbon whereas the early Romans used simple substitution (replacing one character by another). In the 16th century, the polyalphabetic substitution was invented. That was followed by the Enigma encryption machine, which t... (more)

The New Generation of Decompilers

The latest development technologies rely on intermediate languages and can be decompiled. PowerBuilder is no exception. In this article, we will address the risks posed by decompilers. We will also discuss what can be done to protect against the possible negative results of decompilation - whether you create in-house applications, commercial applications, or are using these applications for your business. A PowerBuilder Decompiler? A decompiler is a program that reads executable code and decompiles it, providing access to source code. It has nothing to do with viruses or other f... (more)

SPBUG Meeting: Refactoring of PB applications based Test Driven Development

On Wednesday December 15th, 2010 SPBUG presents a seminar with Yakov Werde: Refactoring of PowerBuilder applications based Test Driven DevelopmentYakov Werde, a 25 year IT industry veteran, has been designing and delivering PowerBuilder training for over 14 years, more than ten of them as an employee of Sybase Inc. Before that he worked as an application architect, project manager and application coder in the trenches of application software development. A professional technology educator, Yakov holds a Masters in Education with a specialty in instructional design for online lear... (more)

Using MS MapPoint in PowerBuilder

Why should you use GIS (Geographic Information System) data in PowerBuilder? You can plan a route for a service technician or a sales person. You can track the positions of the trucks delivering goods and it might allow you to direct a truck to an additional pick up close to its route. You can print driving directions when heading to an unknown place. The following article demonstrates how to use the Microsoft MapPoint control from within PowerBuilder to perform such operations. The MapPoint Control The MapPoint object model contains a lot of objects, but we'll use only a few. Fi... (more)

Taking PowerBuilder's PBDOM Out for a Spin

So you think, "Why bother using PBDOM?" Well, you can use PDOM to manipulate elements in an XML document. That means you can move elements in a document or from one document to another. You can add elements to a document or delete them from a document. And, with a little coding, you can import nested XML data into a DataWindow. With the XML capabilities in the DataWindow introduced with Sybase's PowerBuilder 9, it's possible to import and export data very fast and easily. You might have glanced at the PBDOM definition in the PowerBuilder help and figured it looked hard to handle... (more)