 | A customer of mine has an old PowerBuilder application which computes
monthly compensation for their sales staff and supervisors. The
program serves three roles: 1) Platform for admin to administer
the whole thing; 2) Processor to compute and store into the database;
3) Report viewers with security features built-in to allow only
right people to see only eligible reports.
It is
rock solid, so there is no motivation to rock the boat. At the same
time, business rules change, new payment plan is added year by year.
The application was written in PB 7 which is not known for robust IDE.
I have invented ways to bring long life to this application. I used
Java to supplement the heavy processing (role 2) - database processing,
numbers crunching.
The Java addition is a standalone application which is about 1000
lines. It consists of one class.
This approach has brought many benefits. Less disruptive to users
who use only roles (1) and (3). Java is versatile and rock solid.
Whatever modern features that this PB application needs, Java can
provide. Only one new file (class) is added, as opposed to several
dozens of PB objects would be used if the new feature is written in
PB.
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