According to the Phrase Finder back in the 1930s many American "dust bowl" farmers left the drought stricken mid-west for California with the phrase "California or bust!" emblazoned on their trucks. The drought and the Great Depression were a one-two punch that bankrupted farmers. Most had to use their last few dollars to trek west to start a new life.
While I think it wrong to compare the current long PowerBuilder update 'dry stretch' to the dust bowl and developer morosity to the great depression, there might be some who are tempted to draw parallels.
Rather than resting on my laurels, last month I dove headlong in SAP's HANA maelstrom, voraciously reading and watching content on the HANA Academy, setting up my own HANA Cloud server and using PowerBuilder as my client tool to drive my learning. It's my gut feeling that PowerBuilder's 'golden ticket' to renewed vitality will be when SAP recognizes it as the HANA tool of choice for rich client RAD. My bumper sticker should proclaim "HANA or Bust!'
I've formulated my "maiden voyage" into a 'follow-me' tutorial that started to appear today on SCN. Here's the first installment; I included source code and a SQL AnyWhere database together with ToDo instructions, so you can mimic my accomplishments.
Organizations everywhere currently driven by PowerBuilder can benefit from HANA. Just this morning I had a conversation with Sr PB architect/developer at a Health Insurance provider. He told me about some actuarial number crunching processes that take 5-6 hrs to run. Now that I demonstrated the PowerBuilder / HANA combo he will be asking his management to fund a POC app to demonstrate how using HANA might take that runtime down to less than 5 minutes!
Long Live PowerBuilder