PowerBuilder is an integrated development environment originally developed by Powersoft in 1991. Primarily for building business applications, PowerBuilder is used by many companies in the financial and telecoms sectors where Java and Microsoft Visual Studio are more predominant. There are a number of third-party tools that build upon and enhance the functionality of PowerBuilder, such as Appeon, Visual Expert, and Enable Multilingual.
PowerBuilder has a native data-handling object called a DataWindow, which can be used to create, edit, and display data from the database. This object gives the programmer a number of tools for specifying and controlling user interface appearance and behavior, and also provides simplified access to database content. To some extent, the DataWindow frees the programmer from considering the differences between Database Management Systems from different vendors. Datawindow can display data using multiple presentation styles and can connect to various data sources.