Step 1: Calculate the total size of the PBLs that make up the original PowerBuilder application.
Step 2: Identify the major unsupported features in the existing PowerBuilder application.
Step 3: Briefly assess the amount of work needed to modify the unsupported features in the existing PowerBuilder application. The assessment standards are as follows:
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The more complex the PowerBuilder application is, the more difficult it is to modify its unsupported features. The complexity can be characterized by advanced coding techniques including deep inheritance, etc.
If there is a large amount of business logic on the Client-side (e.g. in Windows and behind controls) and the logic is complex (e.g. it fires 20 events before the business rule is completed), then your application will most likely benefit from moving the business logic into n-Tier NVOs. This takes additional work and needs to be factored in.
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The more unsupported features the PowerBuilder application has, the more effort it takes to modify them.
the section called “Modifying unsupported features” provides methods on working around unsupported features.
Step 4: Decide the migration objective:
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If it is imperative that your company move business to the Web quickly, select the first migration objective and deploy the entire PowerBuilder application to the Web; otherwise select the second or third migration objective.
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Based on the assessments in the previous step, if substantial effort is required to modify the unsupported features in the original PowerBuilder application, you may want to consider converting part of the application to the Web (objective 2). Regardless of the approach taken, it will always take less work to deploy a PowerBuilder application to the Web with Appeon than to rewrite it with J2EE/.NET, as PowerBuilder is highly productive, especially for your PowerBuilder team.
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The third possible objective is to deploy only your application DataWindows to the Web (separately from the application). This involves building a much smaller new PowerBuilder application and reusing the existing DataWindows. This is a logical solution when some key reporting functionality or data needs to be available on the Web in a very short time and it would otherwise take significant effort to deploy the entire application.
