While PowerBuilder is not included with EAServer, the products are fully integrated and work well together. EAServer hosts the PowerBuilder virtual machine natively. This means that EAServer can communicate directly with PowerBuilder nonvisual user objects, and vice versa. EAServer components developed in PowerBuilder can take full advantage of the ease of use and flexibility of PowerScript® and the richness of PowerBuilder’s system objects.
The PowerBuilder IDE runs on Windows platforms, but you can deploy PowerBuilder components to EAServer on any platform for which a compatible PBVM is available, including most UNIX platforms. For more information, see the EAServer Release Bulletin for your platform.
The PowerBuilder IDE includes wizards to create EAServer components and deployment projects. While you can edit PowerBuilder component properties in EAServer Manager, you should use the PowerBuilder IDE instead. Changes you make outside of the IDE can be overwritten when you redeploy your project to EAServer from the IDE. For information on using the wizards, see the Application Techniques manual in the PowerBuilder documentation. If you must set additional component properties that cannot be set from the PowerBuilder IDE, consider creating a script or batch file that uses the jagtool set_props command to configure these additional settings. This allows you to maintain an automated deployment mechanism. For more information, see Chapter 12, “Using jagtool and jagant,” in the EAServer System Administration Guide.
PowerBuilder provides full-fledged support for EAServer component technologies, including:
Instance pooling, by configuring the Pooling setting in the wizards and optionally implementing lifecycle methods to control whether specific instances are pooled.
Server-managed transactions, by configuring the Transactions settings in the wizards and by calling the methods in the TransactionServer context object.
Connection caching, by using PowerScript DataStore objects in your implementation code.
Result sets, by using the PowerScript DataStore, ResultSet, and ResultSets objects. You can use the DataStore object to return result sets that are presented in the client using DataWindow controls. You can also use the ResultSet and ResultSets objects to return tabular results to clients of other types.
Intercomponent calls, using the CreateInstance method in the TransactionServer object to obtain proxies for components.
By default, the TransactionServer CreateInstance method
invokes the EAServer name service to create proxies. Proxies for
remote components may be returned by the name service rather than
an instance that is running locally. To guarantee that a locally
installed instance is used, specify the component as local:package/component,
where package is the package name and component is
the component name, for example, local:CtsSecurity/SessionInfo.
The call fails if the component is not installed in the same server.
Logging, using the ErrorLogging object to write error or status messages to the server log file.
Running independent of client interaction, using the EAServer thread manager or service component model.
For details on implementing components that use these features, see the Application Techniques manual in the PowerBuilder documentation.
