Deanne M. Chance

We begin this article by answering a few questions. Namely, what is VoIP? What is Skype? And why would you want to integrate these capabilities into your PowerBuilder applications? We will begin with the latter. Imagine that you are a field service worker armed with a tablet PC with a wireless broadband connection and you want to call your next client from your appointment list. You could just use your cell phone, but that would require you to look up and dial the number independent of your application. However, imagine an integrated solution whereby you could click on the next appointment and have your application automatically dial that contact. This is where Skype and VoIP come in. By integrating VoIP capabilities into our PowerBuilder applications, it's now possible to call someone directly from within our programs. This article will show you how. For starters... (more)

A Location Tracking System Using PowerBuilder, a GPS Receiver, and Microsoft MapPoint

Did you ever wonder where your kids are driving around on a Saturday night? Perhaps you are a business owner and need to know where your workforce is located on different job sites. With the help of PowerBuilder, a wireless connection, a GPS receiver, and Microsoft MapPoint, you can track the location of any individual in real-time. This article will show you how. To get things started you will need a few things: PowerBuilder A serial-based GPS receiver (Bluetooth will do) MS MapPoint 2004 MS Visual C# (for sockets implementation) A static IP address or a router capable of port f... (more)

Personalizing Your PowerBuilder Applications Using SMS and Voice Messaging

Text messaging is cool. Voice messaging is even cooler. Wouldn't it be great to be able to add that functionality to your PowerBuilder apps as well? For example, when an event occurs within your application, let your users receive real-time notification via SMS or voice messaging to their cell phones! This article will focus on writing Web services to do just that using the Strike Iron SMS and PhoneNotify messaging services. Download the print PDF of this article Download the issue this article appeard in Subscribe to 3 FREE issues! After reading this article you should be able to:... (more)

Consuming Amazon Web Services Using PowerBuilder and SQL Anywhere 10.0.1

Since I'm in the middle of moving to a new city and need to get organized, I thought I'd roll a little application using SQL Anywhere, PowerBuilder, and Amazon Web Services to help organize my media collection. In doing so, I'm going to check out some cool features in SQL Anywhere, in particular, consuming Web Services. Calling Web Services out of your favorite development tool is nothing new. But who knew you could call them out of your favorite database? This opens up a whole world of programming fun. You might be wondering why you'd want to do this. Aside from the obvious - y... (more)

Publishing .NET Web Services Using SQL Anywhere 10.0.1

In this article we're going to take a database and create our own mini version of an "Amazon-like" item lookup. That is to say, any .NET or .NET-compatible client will be able to look up items in our database via the Web by simply providing a UPC. This article will show you how. To complete this project, you'll need a few items: -  SQL Anywhere 10.0.1 or higher. Here is a free developer edition. -  Visual Studio 2005 -  Internet connection -  Some time to learn! Note: This article assumes some knowledge of how to create ODBC connections and how to type in commands in iSQL. If you're no... (more)