Migration from Powerhouse

[Dennis Groenendijk]

Hi Mark,

Let me try to address your point, disconnected from my particular 
product. I do hope the rest of the list agrees with this topic and I do 
apologize sincerely if I have offended anyone with my previous post.

Why would anyone move away from Powerhouse or a 4GL in general to a 3GL 
language like Java? I hope this is an accurate recap of your question?
To be honest: It puzzles me deeply why 4GL's are losing terrain. 4GL's 
like Powerhouse and Oracle Designer are good tools for building 
efficient and maintainable business applications. Some say they simply 
went out of fashion. Some say they were not modernized fast enough to 
keep up with the demands from end users, like GUI's, webinterfaces and 
integration with other software. Others say they have a normal product 
lifecycle and are just at the end. The complete truth might me the 
total of these reasons. The fact is that 4GL's are losing terrain and 
tools are disappearing. Something which did not go unnoticed in this 
group either.

A lot of companies which have used a 4GL succesfully would probably 
never switch if they didn't see those clouds forming. However they must 
look for alternatives and at the moment alternatives either look 
oldfashioned or spell 3GL. Some software on the horizon might not be 
both, but I'll come to that later. Companies can define new conditions 
for such an alternative: One of those I hear frequently is a greater 
independence of suppliers, the second is greater possibility of 
integration. Java and .NET meet these criteria more often than other 
products in the market. The first because it is freely available and 
defined by the Java Community Process and not by a single company, the 
other because it is backed by the biggest IT-company in the world. They 
are however 3GL languages.

Let me be straight about this. You can never build as fast in a 3GL as 
you would in a 4GL, given persons with the same background and 
aptitude. However I do not make the choice, I just try to provide a 
solution for it. To be fair however, I would not be comfortable 
recommending my clients another 4GL in the market to replace 
Powerhouse.

Given the fact clients have to or want to move to a 3GL I came up with 
a solution to ease the transition. Instead of doing a manual 
conversion, which can be very expensive and time-consuming, I automated 
the conversion process. The second thing I did was use open standards 
and a well thoughout framework in which the Java code could run. The 
current version uses Swing, future versions may support xforms and 
jfaces. The third was, my original demand, having readable Java code 
and a completly transparent framework to ease further development and 
maintanence. Thus making it cheaper and easier to move to a 3GL.

Please keep in mind that if you switch to .NET or Java it would be 
silly to just have a compiler and start coding. You would use existing 
frameworks, libraries or components and start with a proper OO-design. 
This wil seriously bridge the gap between productivity in a 3GL and a 
4GL. I don't think however it will close it completely.

Of course there are other solutions for moving away from a 4GL 
language. Notably the move to ERP software, like SAP or Oracle 
Applications. This has the advantage of having most functionality 
standardized and having very stable suppliers. On the downside 
customization is often complicated and consultants may be comparatively 
expensive. Some companies are happy with their transition others are 
not as satisfied, most of them thought it took to long.

The move to a 3GL is not ideal, but maybe more ideal than another 4GL 
or other alternatives. You can decide this for yourself. However I 
don't think you can stay were you are, hoping the current 4GL's will 
live forever. It might be that there will be tools in the future which 
combine the ease of use of a 4GL with the power of 3GL languages. I 
have seen some promissing prototypes and concepts. I would love to work 
on one of those, but their production ripe versions might be a couple 
of years away and you might not have the time to wait.

Sincerely,
Dennis Groenendijk
Brains2B


On 18-nov-04, at 1:11, Mark Stewart wrote:

> Dennis,
>
> I was wondering...do you include the benefits from
> moving from PowerHouse to Java with your product.  I'm
> not sure I understand why you'd want to do something
> like that.  I could not for the life of me imagine
> having to maintain a large business application
> written in Java.  Nightmare waiting to happen there
> I'd say.  I'd be running out of that shop in a hurry.
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