PowerHouse (programming language): Difference between revisions

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[http://www.cognos.com/products/powerhouse/index.html PowerHouse] is a trademarked name for a family of byte-compiled programming languages originally produced for the ''[[HP3000]]'' mini-computer built by [http://www.hp.com ''Hewlett-Packard Corporation'']. It comprised three products, ''Quiz'' - a report writer, ''Quick'' - an interactive character based screen generator, and ''QTP'' - a batch transaction processor, all dependent upon a central Data Dictionary, ''QDD'' and later ''PDL''. The company that developed and marketed these products is now called [http://www.cognos.com ''Cognos Corporation''].

''PowerHouse'' was introduced in 1982 by ''Quasar Corporation'' and bundled together ''Quiz'' and ''Quick'', both of which had been previously available separately, with a new batch processor ''QTP'', now sold as a single product. In 1983, ''Quasar'' changed its name to ''Cognos Corporation'' and began porting their application development tools to other platforms, notably the ''[[IBM]]'' ''series 400'' (later rebranded as the A''S/400''). They also began extending their product line with add-ons to ''PowerHouse'' (''Architect'') and end-user applications written in ''PowerHouse'' (''MultiView'').

An early move to the Intel platform in 1988 (''PowerHouse PC'') proved abortive. Nonetheless, Cognos eventually produced Axiant (c.1995), which effectively ported PowerHouse-like syntax to an ''Intel'' based MS-Windows style visual development environment and linked it to SQL aware [[DBMS]] running on these machines. On the mid-range systems attempts to extend the useful life of ''PowerHouse'' in an age of [[World_Wide_WebWorld |Wide Web|web-aware]] applications led to the development of ''PowerHouse Web'' (c. 1999).

In its day ''PowerHouse'' represented a considerable achivement. Compared with languages like ''[[Cobol]]'', [[Pascal_programming_languagePascal |programming language|''Pascal'']] and ''[[PL/1]]'', ''PowerHouse'' substantially cut the amount of labour required to produce useful applications on its choosen platforms. It achived this through the features provided by a central data-dictionary, a compiled file that extended the attributes of data fields available in native DBMS with freqently used programming idioms such as display masks, help and message strings, range and pattern checks, help and information texts. To accomplish this PowerHouse was tightly coupled by design to the underlying database management system that predominated on each of the target platforms. In the case of the ''HP3000'' this was the ''Image'' shallow-network DBMS and the entire language reflected its origins.

However, even at its introduction and throughout its life, ''PowerHouse'' was not without its detractors. Like all [[Virtual_machineVirtual machine| virtual machine]] languages, PowerHouse had an extraordinary appetite for CPU cycles. On machines that usually ran at speeds considerably less than 40GHz this commonly produced a visibly negative impact on overall transaction performance, frequently necessitating hardware upgrades of considerable expense. It did not endear ''PowerHouse'' to its users that this expense was usually exacerbated by ''Cognos''' own voracious appetite for licence fees tied to hardware performance metrics.

Regardless, ''PowerHouse'' was eventually overtaken by events. The radical changes wrought by the PC revolution, which began just at the time ''PowerHouse'' was introduced, eventually brought down the cost of host computers to such an extent that high priced software development tools, and ''PowerHouse'' was very high priced, became a hard sell. Although ''PowerHouse'' is still available and continues to receive occasional minor updates, by 1999 ''Cognos'' had all but ceased further development of ''PowerHouse'' on mid-range computers in favour of newer product lines. Products like ''Business Intelligence'' and ''Axiant'' that run on commodity architectures as well as high-end ''Unix'' servers now form the core of ''Cognos Corporation'''s business.

[[Category:Programming_languagesProgramming languages]]

[[Category:Minicomputers]]

[[Category:Hewlett-Packard products|3000]]