Is powerhouse dead?

Fri, 31 May 2002 09:34:46 +0200

>How many of you are now dedicating (or already done so) your time porting
your Powerhouse system(s) to the Windows platform? It seems most
>large companies have already signed on the dotted line to either have
PeoplSoft, SAP, Oracle or some other "fancy" system take over the

>true-tried-and-trusted text-terminal systems. The logistics of these
exercises make ENRON crashes seem like kids play.

Hi Fernando!

Your question is very relevant and the answers should be interesting to
many of us. I take it that you are rather pleased with PowerHouse yourself?

The company I'm working for is a 600+ emploee financial and collecting
company in Norway. We are probably one of the 2 or3 last companies in
Norway to leave the HP3000 platform and PowerHouse. We have spent app. 1
1/2 year porting two large PowerHouse systems from MPEix/TurboImage to
HP-UX and Oracle8i. We still use PowerHouse, but our next move is to
implement new versions of our applications in Windows and Web environments.
For that we will certainly use other tools than PowerHouse. We have already
done three "pilot-projects" that tried out Oracle JDeveloper/JSP/Servlets,
PowerBuilder 7.0 and Oracle Java Stored Procedures.  Here are some of our
reasons for this move:

   Character-based systems are considered old-fashion. Users & customers
   wants Windows/Web user interface.
   PowerHouse use a rather old programming-paradigm that restrict good
   programming practices. E.g. the lack of global functions and procedures
   that can be used across PH programs.
   Younger, newly educated programmers learn modern programming practices
   (functional programming, object-oriented programming). They do not want
   to spend time working with at tool like Powerhouse. PowerHouse
   programmers are among Norways endangered species.
   Cognos does not seem to spend much more time or money on further
   developing of PH. This is fairly understandable, but what is worse: they
   do not seem to come up with another usefull modern 4GL based on new
   technology (Windows/Web/Java). (Yes, I know about Axiant).

Of, course there are some "headaches" of such a migration. One of the most
notifying is that developing speed is rather fast using PowerHouse,
compared to some of the more modern 3 GL tools and languages. (Still old PH
code can be rather slow to maintain, since changes often have to be done
several places.) If you try to implement a PH application using pure Java
og C++, you will probably spend 5-10 times the hours you used with
PowerHouse (maybe more).

What we feel that we need is Windows/Web based "4GL" that offers high level
programming and access to a object oriented programming paradigm. Sybase
PowerBuilder have been (and are) a good candidate in a Windows environment.
Their move to Web/Java have also been rather slow, but version 7 and 8 have
good Web/HTML mechanisms, and PB version 9 promises to have support for
J2EE/JSP/Servlets. Also Oracle 9i and Oracle Developer (JDeveloper, Forms,
WebForms) seem rather promising.

Our pilot-projects have also shown that moving important business-logic
from PowerHouse to database stored procedures and views, is very
successfull. The procedures is a nice way to develop and maintain code at
one place, and making it available for both klientapplications on
PowerHouse, Windows and Web platforms. Oracle views are a nice way to
replace PowerHouse use files containing generally defined DEFINE
statements. Both views and stored procedures moves execution load from PH
to Oracle and reduces transport of data from Oracle to PH. This gives a
general (and sometimes dramatical) improvement on response times.

Finally a red rose to Cognos: Until now, we have not found another tool for
handling batchprocessing, that can be compared to qtp. Probably qtp is the
one Powerhouse component that will have the longest future life with us.

Regards

Jon Kvisli
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Principal consultant
Lindorff Applications as
Hellandtunet research- and business centre
P.O.Box 4, 3833 Bų in Telemark, Norway
ph: 35 06 15 71
fax: 35 06 15 01
e-mail: jon.kvisli@lindorffapplications.com
www.lindorffapplications.com
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