It looks like the majority of articles on PowerBuilder are titled either “Future of PB ” or “Is PB Dead? “. Here’s a fresh one: http://pbdj.sys-con.com/read/105375.htm. The very fact that this topic keeps popping up here and there tells me that there’s somthing wrong in this community.
I’ve been doing PB from ’93 to ’98 and loved it. After that, I swithced to Java and never regreted it. My wife is still doing PB, so I
have an idea what’s going on there. In my opinion, PB is not dead but in a deep coma.
Datawindow is really a great component, but
the client-server technology does not seem to be the right way to go. During the last several years, PB is undergoing a facelift surgery to introduce Web components and ability to work with J2EE, but I still need a really good reason to use PB for my front end development. You
can take an old car and slowly replace its parts with the better
ones, but it’s still an old car…
From the career point of view,
PB may not be a bad choice if you are not willing to learn new
technologies all the time. There are plenty of PB applications in
production, and someone will have to support them for many years to
come.
You should be able to make a decent living with PB for quite a long time.
Yakov
yakovfain.com 