Web Enabling Your HP 3000

Cognos’ PowerHouse® Web and the HP e3000

As organizations around the world begin to investigate the use of Web technologies for some of

their business application needs, the Cognos

PowerHouse family of high-productivity applica-

tion development tools is ready to help save valuable developer time and money in building and

deploying those solutions.

There are currently thousands of HP e3000 sites around the world that rely on PowerHouse 4GL

to build and run their business-critical application solutions. With its easy-to-use English-like

specification language and efficient native access to TurboIMAGE, KSAM and MPE data,

PowerHouse 4GL quickly established itself as the most productive and cost-effective way to

develop terminal-based business applications for the HP e3000. Twenty years of on-going

research, development and performance tuning have seen PowerHouse 4GL evolve to the point

where many customers have stopped using COBOL and other 3GLs altogether. PowerHouse 4GL

now also supports native access to relational databases, such as ALLBASE/SQL and

ORACLE, other platforms such as UNIX and Windows NT, and has become the application

server for Axiant

4GL client/server applications using both the thin-client and fat-client

deployment models.

The Cognos product philosophy is, and always has been, to enable customers to adopt new

computing technologies and environments as-and-when they are ready to do so...while at the

same time protecting existing investments in applications and developer skills. For example,

current terminal-based PowerHouse 4GL applications can be imported into Axiant 4GL, the

visual PowerHouse integrated development environment (IDE), where a Windows user interface

is automatically generated. The application can then be deployed back to the original server

machine to run in a thin-client configuration with Windows-based Axiant 4GL clients and server-

based PowerHouse 4GL application servers - providing an updated interface for users and pro-

tecting the customer’s investment in their application code, servers, data and developer skills.

As well as providing capabilities to assist in re-deploying or migrating existing PowerHouse 4GL

applications, the modern Windows-based Axiant 4GL IDE is an ideal environment for building

entirely new server-based, client/server or mobile PowerHouse 4GL applications.

PowerHouse Web is the latest addition to the Cognos PowerHouse family. It enables Web appli-

cations to be built using the proven developer productivity of either PowerHouse 4GL or Axiant

4GL, and then deployed using a Web-specific version of the robust PowerHouse application

server engine. The latest versions of PowerHouse 4GL and Axiant 4GL are both enhanced with

new web-specific features that generate a default HTML user interface. The generated user

interface is fully functional, and by default uses only standard HTML.

However, this user interface is open to enhancement with HTML, XML, JavaScript or any other

feature supported by the target Web browser - simply by editing the PowerHouse-generated

HTML template file with a text editor, or using any of the popular Web authoring tools, such as

Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. PowerHouse Web also provides a sophisti-

cated request distribution mechanism, enabling these applications to be deployed across a het-

erogeneous network of Web servers, PowerHouse Web application server and database servers.