Is PowerHouse DEAD?

[Jon Kvisli]

The "Is Powerhouse dead"-debate has been repeating it self several times
on this maillist during the past 2-3 years. I am beginning to think that
the answer to many of the questions raised, may be that the total number
of "in-house" developed applications are dramatically reduced. I.e: The
worldwide market for high-level, 4GL-ish developing tools has shrunk,
and is about to reach a size so small that it is not capable of feeding
more than a very small number of providers. (Cognos is of course milking
the last drops out of PH, but Axiant have probably shown them that it is
not possible to capital from developing new such tools(?))

The most obvious argument for the belief decribed above, is that there
seems to be very few new "4GL-tools" emerging, that are based on new
software platforms like J2EE. If the "4GL- marked" had been big enough,
I would have expected such tools to reach the marked much earlier. It
may of-course be that these technology platforms still have been too
immature and unstable for such tools to bee developed. If this is the
case, we should expect good tools to be available over the next few
years. 

Yes, of course I am aware of the several graphical IDEs, class-libraries
and frameworks for Java/J2EE, but these are still not anywhere near the
productivity and simplicity that most of us know from older 4GLs like
PH. It may be true that this way of developing applications, WILL
replace 4GL development totally, but to do so, I think the functionality
of the tools must be increased, and the learning curve lowered.

During the 90ies, Sybase PowerBuilder established itself as a marked
leading client-server 4GL for developing in-house applications. When the
client-server paradigm was replaced with multi-tier technology,
PowerBuilder paled for some years. However, the newly released PB 9.0,
may be able to gain new ground on .NET and J2EE platforms. Even if it
does, PB needs a framwork like PFC on top, to let you develop OLT
systems as easy and fast as PowerHouse did. (And still you will not find
anything like QTP.)

Oracle have also taken their Forms from character based, via Windows
client/server, to the Web and J2EE world. However Forms does not seem to
have many supporters outside the Oracle community. I have no personal
experience with Forms, but it seem to me that it has drawn a lot of
negative attentions to itself over the last years. At least in Norway,
some of the big software projects I know of, that went really wrong,
have been based on Forms.

The reason that the number of in-house applications are reduced, is
ofcourse that companies are moving to "mass-produced" more-or-less
standardized applications like SAP, Peoplesoft and Oracle Applications.
To develop such general systemes, one will probably not use a high-level
4GL (even though I think that Oracle Applications is partly delevoped
using Forms?). This is partly because the licencing costs for 4GL is not
target at "OEM-providors", and partly because 4GLs are to restrictive
for developing generalized systems. Companies that develop of such
applications are therefore not a market potential for 4GL providors, or
they develop their own developingtools.

Jon Kvisli
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Principal Consultant

Lindorff Applications as
Hellandtunet research- og businesscentre
P.O.Box 4, 3833 Bo in Telemark
phone: +47 35 06 15 71
fax: +47 35 06 15 01
mail: jon.kvisli@lindorffapplications.com
www.lindorffapplications.com
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