Powerbuilder, where sanity comes to an end

Powerbuilder...

Just listen to that name for a moment. Even trying to say it gives you this sick feeling. Even if you have no idea of what powerbuilder is it just sounds lame. Turns out that reality really is stranger than fiction. Tools with the word "power" in them usually turn out to be anything but powerful.

So let me introduce you, Powerbuilder is a RAD tool. Something like Delphi or Visual Basic I guess. Without going into a turf war let me just say that I would be surprised if anything sucked harder than powerbuilder.

Right now I'm in a situation where a Custom Powerbuilder Application, let's call it Cpa is supposed to call a webservice on a Weblogic Integration server which in turn routes this to a .Net application.

Now working with webservices in WLI is actually excellent. I thought that Weblogic Workshop would suck hard with this as well, but it has actually been performing quite nicely. Alot more reliable than Visual Studio with ASP.NET that's for sure.

WLI also handles complex xsd's with ease. In a previous post I detailed visual studio .net 2003 and it's inabilities with xsd's, especially when it comes to "xs:token" ...

In comes powerbuilder...with full support for Web services they say.
However, not only does it not support complex wsdl's it also has this super nice feature, where if you happen to define a http get or post binding in your wsdl file it will not parse it and dies. Seriously, I've spent the last few hours helping a Powerbuilder developer call my web service. Hearing him complain about how WLI generates faulty or overly complex wsdl files.

Finally I located the error. Removing the lines regarding HTTP Post and HTTP Get bindings fixed everything and Powerbuilder works like a ch..err car without gas, it's possible to make it move forward, but slow as hell...

So, the tip of today. Don't ever use powerbuilder, and if you have to remember to strip your wsdl files of any other binding than SOAP.