PowerHouse Web / Axiant

[Jones Allen (Van)]

Hi, Tony...

We, too, decided to give our application a modern face and considering the
expense of converting to VB, we decided to stay with Powerhouse.  I've been
experimenting with Axiant on and off since Autumn, 2000.  Presently, we have
a team of four people working on moving our application to Axiant 3.1, build
1342.

Our application runs on UNIX and Oracle.  We have Axiant clients running on
NT and W2K.

RE: wisdom of doing it -- Only you can answer that one.  I think Axiant may
follow the original Powerhouse data processing model more closely that PH
Web because it is not "stateless" the way web pages are, but I have no
experience with PH Web, so that comment may not be accurate.

I have no horror stories.  Initially (early version 3.0) I found that Axiant
was unstable and frequently halted with GPF errors.  The version we're using
now is considerably better but still stops unexpectedly.

Our conversion project is proceeding.  There are some difficulties, but the
pain of not converting or using VB is greater than the pain of the issues we
have with Axiant, and we're learning to live with it.  Cognos has been very
responsive in dealing with questions we have, but there are always new
things to discuss with them.

Don't underestimate the time you need to understand all your issues before
you begin the conversion project.  Play with it for a while to see how it
works and to understand some of its idiosyncracies first.  Next, choose a
small but "interesting" subset of your application and convert it.  Try
deploying.  By then, you'll know how you want to handle the whole conversion
project.

It's not hard for experienced Powerhouse staff who have an insight into
Windows terminology and functions to do the conversion.  You need a thorough
exploration of Axiant's features in order to use it effectively.  You don't
need to try them all, but if you know what they are and where to find them,
you can resolve issues more easily.

Based on the team's early experience with Axiant, we decided to use it for
the GUI interface only and are keeping Quiz and QTP programs as well as
screens that have no terminal interaction out of Axiant.

We have decided to not use the Axiant deployment function because it is
designed to distribute compiled programs.  We have to compile our programs
at our customer sites so distributing compiled files is not an option.

-----Original Message-----
From: tknowles@csc.co.nz [mailto:tknowles@csc.co.nz]
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2001 2:50 PM
To: powerh-l@lists.swau.edu
Subject: PowerHouse Web / Axiant


Hi
We are looking at 'modernising' a mature PH application currently running
on HPe3000. the application currently has 700 Quick screens, 300 Qtp, 1100
Quiz passes and 94 Cobol programs.
We don't have any immediate plans to move away from the HPe3000 or Image
database, but would like to look at PHWeb and / or Axiant.
Any info regarding this, wisdom of doing it, time required, degrees of
difficulty, benefits, horror stories, alternatives would be appreciated.
Thanks
Tony Knowles


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