The Death, or Life of PowerHouse

[Welsh, Wesley]

Curious masses:

We have been using PowerHouse on the AS/400 since 1994 and have built large
applications for Law Enforcement, Jail Management, Finances, Voter
Registration and other local government applications.  We employ 10
programmers on PowerHouse applications and 4 to maintain purchased RPG
applications.  As the largest local government organization in South
Carolina and the one most progressive towards application development, we
are working with SC State Court Administration towards (very soon)
conversion of our courts system to a purchased package.  In Greenville
County, we are currently using an older version of the package and have
integrated it with Solicitor, Law Enforcement and Jail Management
applications.  The long-range intent is that the purchased system will be
implemented state-wide through regional datacenters with communications to a
central database.  We also assume that the interfaced applications that we
have written will be useful to other counties.  

We certainly have a concern regarding the long-term viability of PH, both
for support regarding our current systems and the possibility that we may
deploy applications state-wide.  We wrote Cognos and got the following
response:

While it is true that Cognos currently has no plans to enhance the
functionality of the AS/400 version of PowerHouse 4GL, we do still fully
support the 6.07F version of the product. This means that we provide full
telephone and web-based technical support (through the customer support
portal at http://support.cognos.com), and will correct any serious product
issues while maintaining both operating system and data access compliance.

Also, while we normally rely on IBM's reliable claims for upward
compatibility for later versions of OS/400, we have tested PowerHouse 4GL
6.07F on OS/400 V5R1. No issues were found. Although we may have been
perceived as slow to do this testing,  we do try to schedule conformance
testing on a new operating system as soon as we can after they are released.
With apologies to our valued AS/400 customers, with so many platforms and
products to support this does not always happen as quickly as we and our
customers would like. 

We also support access to AS/400 data through ODBC from our Windows-based
versions of PowerHouse 4GL, PowerHouse Web and Axiant 4GL. Hence it is quite
possible to use PowerHouse technologies to deploy three-tier applications
(with an Axiant thin-client on the users' Windows desktop connecting to
PowerHouse 4GL on Windows NT/2000 servers, which access data on an AS/400)
or web-based applications (with a web browser on the users' desktop
connecting with your web server on Windows NT/2000 or UNIX, which directs
application requests to PowerHouse Web on Windows NT/2000 servers accessing
data on the AS/400). These Windows-based versions of the PowerHouse products
fully support embedded SQL, which can often result in more efficient data
handling and network usage against relational data sources.

We are sometimes asked how long Cognos will support PowerHouse and the
customers using PowerHouse. While the world of information technology is a
very dynamic and fast-changing one, PowerHouse is proving to be a very
long-lived and adaptable product. Cognos intends to continue supporting and
enhancing the PowerHouse family of products for as long as there is customer
demand and it is economically feasible to do so. If Cognos decides to
discontinue PowerHouse support for a specific hardware platform or database,
we will provide our supported customers with written notice of such
decisions well in advance - so that they can plan their migration to a
platform or database that is still supported by PowerHouse in a timely
manner.

With my best regards and sincere apologies for the delay in responding to
you,
ct

___________________________________
Carol Thompson
Director, Application Development Tools
Cognos Inc.
Telephone: 613-738-1338 extn 7257
email: carol.thompson@cognos.com 




Make your own determination regarding what this really means, however, this
is the second time that I've been told by Cognos (The first was by Ron Z.)
that PH6.07f will be around for a very long time.

A little history about us that might help.  We converted (reluctantly) to
the AS/400 as an alternative to Y2K conversion of all our mainframe COBOL
systems.  We were advised to examine a 4GL rather than RPG due to our
limited staff and time and our total lack of experience on RPG.  We have
been extremely pleased, from a developer standpoint, with PowerHouse.  We do
all of our PH training inhouse and newhires seem to pick it up very quickly.
We have found that there are other products that used with PowerHouse meet
all of our application needs.  We use J-Walk to develop GUI screens and even
though PowerHouse doesn't generate DSPF files to import directly into
J-Walk, there is a manual screen identification function that works very
well.  We are able to add check boxes, pop-up screens and many other Windows
functionality into PH screens very easily.  In addition, if something
happened to J-Walk, users can still use the underlying "green-screen".
J-Walk will also deploy to a browser for Web access to PH screens.  We have
also added preprinted forms and reports capability through use of PH screens
calling Crystal Reports.  On J-Walk screens this involves clicking a button,
and on green-screens an option is taken.  We have included user-based
security and print routing on this feature.  Another easy interface has been
to our imaging system, where Quick screens (through fairly simple scripts)
pass key information to provide automatic lookup of images without any
rekeying of information.  Soon we hope to link screens to mug shot and
fingerprint images.

We continually investigate new technologies, however, so many of the current
offerings are overly complex and deal with so many "pieces" that our
combination of PowerHouse, Crystal Reports and J-Walk seem to provide a much
more effective solution.  For our needs, Java, XML, .Net and etc. don't seem
to offer any functionality that we don't already have and the pain of
conversion seems beyond our capacity to deal with.  Every version upgrade of
OS/400 seems to incur some pain - I can't imagine what would be involved if
everything was written in Websphere - it seems you would be constantly in a
mode of maintaining compatiblity with infrastructure "pieces" that change
every few months!  We would rather spend the majority of our application
effort on the applications!

Hope this helps some.

Wesley Welsh
Greenville County Government
301 University Ridge, Suite 1800
Greenville, SC  29601-3660

(864) 467-7123
(864) 467-7990 fax

wwelsh@greenvillecounty.org