Cognos PowerHouse 4GL

IBM® Cognos® PowerHouse 4GL means productivity

Your developers can build business applications with IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL, a fourth-generation language, considerably faster than with a procedural third-generation language (3GL) such as COBOL, BASIC, C, C++ or JAVA®. IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL simplifies operations that might take dozens of lines of 3GL code into a single instruction. Time and cost savings of up to 90%, when compared with traditional 3GL tools, are possible during both the initial development and subsequent maintenance and enhancement of business applications.

With IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL, the power is ready when your developers need it. The smooth incremental learning curve means that you get an immediate return on your investment. When your developers first start to use IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL, many of their basic requirements are handled by its default features. As they become more familiar with it, they can add their own specifications to the default application. Finally, when the default processing and non-procedural specifications don't quite provide exactly what they need, they can take full control and make use of IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL's powerful procedural constructs.

Industrial-strength power

Business applications contain many common elements that 3GL programmers find themselves coding repeatedly. Basic validation functions, such as data input, entire screen-handling routines, file and database input and output routines, relational database transaction management, concurrency control and exception handling are all issues that 3GL programmers encounter. IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL, however, provides such functions automatically and intelligently, while still allowing the developer to customize these standard operations without having to resort to 3GL coding.

Superior user interfaces

IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL helps your developers build business applications that are truly easy to learn and intuitive to operate. QUICK, the interactive end-user component of IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL, enables you to deploy data entry and inquiry applications to traditional character-cell terminals.

But there's more, much more. IBM Cognos Axiant 4GL provides your developers with a visual development environment in which to build applications that can be deployed in a variety of thin-client, fat-client, mobile, standalone and server-based architectures... all from a single source program.

And IBM Cognos PowerHouse Web now provides the ability to deploy IBM Cognos PowerHouse QUICK screens for access through standard web browsers, such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The power to integrate

IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL uses your existing data files and database management systems without requiring costly data conversion. You can enhance and integrate with existing applications as well as building new applications.

Available platforms

IBM Cognos PowerHouse is currently available across a wide variety of business server platforms, including:

Supported database and file systems

The IBM Cognos PowerHouse application server engine, common to IBM Cognos PowerHouse 4GL, IBM Cognos Axiant 4GL and IBM Cognos PowerHouse Web, supports native access to the following database management and file systems:

Note: Not all databases and file systems are supported on all platforms.