The thousands of sites running PowerHouse applications finally have an option to bring those programs onto the Internet, now that Cognos has started to ship PowerHouse Web. First announced in May of 1998, the product for MPE/iX began shipping on Feb. 29. Cognos product manager Conrad Whithall explained that a new 8.29 version of application development tool PowerHouse is required to take programs onto intranets and the Internet, but the Cognos solution can be run entirely from e3000 servers. In contrast to the e3000 Web solution from its competitor Speedware, Cognos says its target audience for PowerHouse Web will be sites already familiar with the Cognos PowerHouse language. Field testers, according to Whithall, “just love how easy it is to build Web applications with the 4GL they already know, with access to native data on 3000s — whether it’s IMAGE, KSAM, Oracle or Allbase.” The Cognos Web solution for HP e3000s requires you to own or purchase PowerHouse.

The PowerHouse Web solution is a separate suite of programs that provide a Web server, dispatcher, Common Gateway Interface and an administrator utility. All but the utility, which is a PC tool, run on the HP 3000. The Web Server is a modified version of the existing PowerHouse QUICK engine, which deals with Web requests instead of terminal-based users. The dispatcher ensures incoming browser requests are passed to an appropriate PowerHouse Web Server process, or to another PowerHouse Web Dispatcher on a different machine. Cognos is using the dispatcher to distribute the PowerHouse Web environment over multiple machines, some of which may be running under operating systems other than HP e3000s. The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) program must be hosted on the same machine which hosts a company’s Web server — and by Web server here, Cognos does not mean the PowerHouse component of the same name. In other words, if HP 3000-only Apache/iX Web service is your plan, you’ll host the CGI on your 3000. The CGI takes an incoming browser request and passes it to an available PowerHouse Web Dispatcher. It then waits for the results from the PowerHouse Web Server process which dealt with the request, and returns those results to the user's browser via the site's Web server. The PowerHouse Web Administrator is a Windows-based utility which configures and controls the number and location of PowerHouse Web Dispatchers and PowerHouse Web Servers in a network.

Cognos makes it all available to existing PowerHouse 4GL sites through the 8.29 version, also just released, which includes an HTML option to the SCREEN statement.This version of the 4GL “includes all of the abilities to build the Web front ends for PowerHouse,” said Whithall. He described it as the development tool, and then Web is the new deployment environment” The HTML option generates Web templates for screens, he explained. “You carry on using PowerHouse 4GL to build the application. It generates an HTML template which acts as the interface to that particular PowerHouse program logic through a Web browser.” QDESIGN extensions generate templates with standard HTML, which can be imported and edited in development environments such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage. The extensions also identify records uniquely for re-retrieval, enhance default HTML templates with new options, and set up links to other forms.

Cognos is pricing the Powerhouse Web suite of programs starting at $3,750 for 25 Named Users, plus the PowerHouse e3000 license fees (currently starting at $7,800 for an 8-user license at the lowest 310 tier of e3000s). Until the end of October, Cognos is offering a 40 percent discount off both PowerHouse and PowerHouse Web products, a deal which is the company’s entry in HP’s e3000 Coupon Book program. A detailed developer’s guide to PowerHouse Web is available from the Cognos Web site as a downloadable PDF file. If you’ve got a PC, you can browse to www.cognos.com/power house/phweb.exe for a self-extracting guide. A new version of the Axiant 4GL IDE for PowerHouse apps is promised for next month that supports Web enhancements in PowerHouse 8.29.