PowerHouse (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:01, 24 April 2006

Revision as of 05:38, 9 July 2006

Line 6:

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 Web|web-aware]] applications led to the development of ''PowerHouse Web'' (c. 1999).

In its day ''PowerHouse'' represented a considerable achivementachievement. Compared with languages like ''[[Cobol]]'', [[Pascal programming language|''Pascal'']] and ''[[PL/1]]'', ''PowerHouse'' substantially cut the amount of labour required to produce useful applications on its chosen platforms. It achieved 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 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.