After months in the wilderness of client-based development tools and other platforms, Cognos is returning to its HP 3000 roots with the release of PowerHouse Series 8.1. Users of the fourth generation language will be able to stage development of their PowerHouse applications on the Axiant 4GL, then deploy the applications using the PowerHouse engine on HP 3000 systems.
Rob Collins, director of Cognos' 4GL Product Development, admitted the company's attempts to serve both the evolution needs of existing PowerHouse applications as well as Visual Basic style PC development through Axiant didn't work. "It was in response to what people were asking for," Collins said. "In retrospect, that was not the right way to go about it. It's very hard to bring out a new product and accommodate 15 years of history at the same time."
PowerHouse, which traces its earliest roots to QUIZ programs written in the late 1970s, sports a customer base with programs as old as Cognos itself. The company recently held its annual user group meeting and proudly displayed the HP 3000 as a supported platform, positioned on one banner above more trendy choices such as Windows NT and Unix. Collins said the new PowerHouse design positions Axiant as a workbench for PowerHouse applications, a result of rebuilding the product "from the ground up."
"Axiant has been dedicated back to PowerHouse, a client for PowerHouse servers," Collins said. Cognos has spent the past year rebuilding Axiant, he explained. Customers who wanted to bring 15-year-old PowerHouse applications forward using Axiant's first release didn't succeed, he said.
Cognos remodeled Axiant's object-based repository around the PowerHouse syntax for the upcoming version 2 of the product. Cognos has begun calling its latest generation of PowerHouse the 800 Series, including an accumulation of relational database functionality built into the product. Server engines for Axiant clients are also part of the PowerHouse 800 Series.
The newest release will enable customers with PowerHouse 7.09 or 7.29 MPE/iX applications to migrate their programs through Axiant and redeploy them with a Windows graphical interface. They can also continue to use PowerHouse as a syntax-based development environment. The PowerHouse engine on MPE/iX servers remains the processing center for the Axiant thin clients. Customers can also take parts of their applications onto PCs under Windows 95 or Windows NT, while other parts execute on the HP 3000.
The 800 Series software will also let customers use Oracle databases in conjunction with PowerHouse applications, so PowerHouse drives the Oracle database. PowerHouse is supporting the Oracle 7 Server for MPE/iX. The product will continue to support IMAGE/SQL, Allbase/SQL and KSAM files.
Cognos intends for its customers to get more comfortable using Axiant as a way to manipulate the forms in their applications. It uses the term 4GL with Axiant "to show that we've dedicated it back to the PowerHouse 4GL engine," Collins said. "You can continue to develop in the terminal-based fashion with an editor in PowerHouse 8 and develop applications. When you write code in the Axiant environment, it's the PowerHouse language. If you're good in PowerHouse, you can take those skills forward and use them in Axiant."
Axiant manipulates objects rather than relying on syntax-based code to create forms. Procedures within Axiant use the PowerHouse syntax. "We've done everything we can to make Axiant very comfortable for PowerHouse programmers -- which is very different from what we did in Axiant 1.0," Collins said.
Cognos is rolling out the product in two phases. The 8.0 version is the PowerHouse server, which Cognos intends to be used by customers planning to migrate their PowerHouse applications to client-server or use Axiant as their development platform for new applications.
The 8.1 version of PowerHouse will be the upgrade path for 7.xx and 6.xx HP 3000 customers who want to continue using PowerHouse syntax as their primary development and deployment environment. The 8.1 version will also act as server for the Axiant 2.0 development and deployment clients. Cognos will ship 8.1 to all supported customers sometime in mid-1997. The product will also include a Year 2000 workbench (See related st ory this issue).