Capabilities

PowerBuilder mainly focuses on business applications, although a few versions support applications on mobile devices housing .NET interaction and data window innovations. It is a fourth-generation object-oriented programming language that builds client-server applications and is a graphical user interface (GUI) development tool running on Windows 32- and 64-bit operating systems. The language used to program PowerBuilder is called Powerscript, which is an object-oriented language. It supports inheritance, polymorphism and encapsulation. Programmers use a common code framework called PowerBuilder foundation classes (PFC) to inherit objects from pre-existing code. PowerBuilder applications are compiled to p-code, which is then interpreted by Power Builder run time. The component that makes PowerBuilder so powerful is a data window, which permits data access, retrieval, filtering and sorting capabilities. The data window uses a visual SQL painter that supports unions, joins and sub-query operations, allowing developers to handle SQL queries. Data window updates produce SQL at run time.