Development tools (was Is PowerHouse DEAD?)

[Edis, Robert]

Thanks for your input Jon.

I believe Oracle Forms (part of Oracle Developer) ONLY works with Oracle
databases.  Virtually ALL Oracle application packages such as Financials,
Manufacturing, etc. use Forms as their front end.

Forms is awkward enough that on one project i worked on a feasibility test
was done on converting PH screens to Forms.  Using an average complexity
Quick screen and an average level Forms programmer it took 7 days per screen
for conversion.  That's just one 4GL to another.  I believe to convert a
Quick screen to say ASP.NET or VB.NET would take quite a bit longer.

ASP.NET is a big improvement over ASP and it has some 4GL like features but
simple table/column handling is still sooo tedious compared with using PH.

I have also been forced to use SQL in place of QTP for many projects.  SQL
is fast but it lacks the full capabilities of QTP when doing complex
programming tasks.  Even adding simple Y-T-D values to a table is more
difficult in SQL than QTP requiring either the use of a cursor (slow) or
multiple SQL statements (one for each month of the year).

I am using Impromptu primarily for reporting.  I miss using Quiz as to get
the same capability I must use database views and/or temporary tables.  When
you are not the DBA this can be very restrictive.

PowerBuilder was/is a good C/S development tool but it too seems to have
suffered in the face of VB and Java.  Borland's Delphi is another good
attempt at bringing a 3GL tool up-to-date with OO features and some 4GL
features.  But Delphi is more popular outside the USA than in the world's
largest market.

Besides J2EE/Java and the MS .NET tools what do you all see as the 'new
wave' of programming opportunities?

Blue

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Kvisli [mailto:jon.kvisli@lindorffapplications.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2003 2:05 PM
To: powerh-l@lists.swau.edu
Subject: Is PowerHouse DEAD?


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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Lindorff Applications as
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phone: +47 35 06 15 71
fax: +47 35 06 15 01
mail: jon.kvisli@lindorffapplications.com
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