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Powerbuilder to Java Convert

 
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Does anyone know of a free tool which will convert powerbuilder into Java?

A developer I'm working with said JDeveloper will do it but keeps making excuses why he can't show me how so I don't think it can be done.

Thank you.
 
ranger
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Even if it could, which I don't know. I would be very wary of any converter. Waht kind of code would it write. Powerbuilder and Java are so different that I would highly highly recommend that you re-write your application in Java.

Mark
 
Patrick Ferguson
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Thanks Mark,

Trust me, I agree completely, but we have about 30,000 lines of powerbuilder code to go through to write an application in 40 working days. I was hoping to get some sort of head start by having it converted to Java.
 
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Sorry I have no suggestions, but I know how it feels, the crunch, haha.

Anyway, good luck.
 
Mark Spritzler
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But I would hope that those 30,000 lines would be much less when in Java.

Just throw people at it.

Mark
 
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Hi, unfortuneately I nothing that will help, except I would advise against trying to write a converter. Years ago (and no I don't have the source), I wrote a program which would analyse PB source code and produce Javadoc style html output. At that time, the only documentors for PB produced word docs which are a waste of time for documenting source code.

The one thing I remember from that experience is that the PB source code file format is really hard to fathom. The source is undocumented within the file and there are no delimiters between different sectyions. I spent many hours making subtle changes to a project and then looking at the raw source to see what the effect was. There is a specific order that PB writes stuff into each file, but you will have to do a lot of work to figure it out and your parsers will have to approach each line of text as though it could be any part of the object in question.

Basically it's a pain and I think you would be far better off using your source PB as an inspiration for the java code. Then get together several trusted programmers and put in some hours.

Sorry.
Derek.
 
Patrick Ferguson
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Thanks for all the answers. We have three people on the project, and hopefully a fourth is coming. That's all we have to "throw" at the code, so I guess we will just have to put in some hours.
 
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Mark Spritzler wrote:But I would hope that those 30,000 lines would be much less when in Java.  

Just throw people at it.  

Mark



Unfortunately, this is not the case. There will be more Java code than PB code, especially if you have many datawindows.

Q: How do I know this?
A: I have been working on porting a PB application to a Java web app for almost 5 years. It looks like I still need 5 more to finish porting it.
 
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