When you have decided which is the appropriate packaging model for your application, you can use the packaging facilities in PowerBuilder to implement it. For the most part, this involves working in the Project painter. You can use the Project painter to build components, proxy libraries, and HTML files as well as executable applications.
The Project painter for executable applications orchestrates all aspects of the packaging job by enabling you to:
Specify the executable file to create
Specify any dynamic libraries (DLL or PBD files) to create
Specify the resources you want included in the executable file or in each particular dynamic library (by using appropriate PBR files that indicate where to get those resources)
Choose machine code or Pcode as the compiler format to generate
With machine code, you can also specify a variety of code generation options (such as optimization, trace information, and error context information).
Choose build options, including whether you want the Project painter to do a full or incremental rebuild of your application’s objects when generating the executable application
Save all of these specifications as a project object that you can use whenever necessary to rebuild the whole package
For more information on using the Project painter, see the PowerBuilder User’s Guide.
When you make revisions to an existing application, your changes might not affect all its dynamic libraries. You can rebuild individual dynamic libraries from the pop-up menu in the System Tree or the Library painter.
If changes are isolated and do not affect inherited objects in other PBLs, you might be able to distribute individual PBDs to your users to provide an upgrade or bug fix. However, Sybase recommends that you always perform a full rebuild and distribute the executable file and all the application’s dynamic libraries whenever you revise an application.
