Jaguar Development With Powerbuilder 7 (Powerbuilder Developer's Library)

This book focuses on several aspects of the new PowerBuilder. First it explains the advantages of Jaguar CTS for distributed computing. Sections on transaction processing and resource management (for database connections and object pooling) show why PowerBuilder components get a new lease on life for today's enterprise through Jaguar. Early chapters show off the strengths of Jaguar CTS (which Sybase is bringing to all major platforms, including Linux). There's coverage of common administrative tasks, such as installing components on the server.

Later sections are geared more toward the PowerBuilder programmer. The author provides a guide to creating Jaguar-compliant PowerBuilder objects that will run on the middle tier. Sections on database support show off how to use DataStore to retrieve records from databases on the server. There isn't much on creating HTML-based or Java interfaces here (though that is a possibility with PowerBuilder 7). Instead, the book looks at creating PowerBuilder clients that hook into Jaguar components on the server.

In all, Jaguar Development makes a good case that PowerBuilder is ready to take on enterprise computing. For any manager or programmer with legacy PB code, this book will certainly be a welcome release. It gives you what you need to know to design and run your PowerBuilder objects on the powerful Jaguar CTS middle-tier solution. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Enterprise computing overview, two-tiered and multitiered system architectures, Sybase Enterprise Application Server (EAS) and Jaguar Component Transaction Server (CTS) basics, CORBA, Jaguar CTS administration, Jaguar Manager, designing PowerBuilder 7 Jaguar components, connection caches, Jaguar component lifecycle, instance pooling, Jaguar database programming: Embedded SQL, DataWindows, DataStores, result sets, transactions, security, deploying Jaguar applications, and asynchronous processing in Jaguar.