Enhancing the HP e3000 User Interface

Appendix D: Advanced 4GL Products
Cognos™ PowerHouse™—Web, Windows and Terminal Interfaces From a
Single Program
Cognos has been providing its high-productivity PowerHouse application development tools to
the HP e3000 community for over 20 years. PowerHouse is widely used to build and maintain
core business applications as it often delivers developer productivity gains of up to 90% when
compared with traditional 3GLs such as COBOL. Most of these applications still rely on the very
flexible screen formatting capabilities within PowerHouse to deliver an attractive user interface
on traditional character-cell terminals, or via terminal emulation software. However, in these
days of Web browsers and Windows client/server applications, the traditional terminal interface
is often regarded by end-users as “old fashioned”—even if it is still the most efficient user
interface for the task at hand. You now need to deliver your organization’s core business
applications with an attractive, easy-to-use Web or Windows interface while retaining the power
and reliability of your HP e3000 servers.
PowerHouse Web—Adding an Open HTML User Interface to PowerHouse Applications
PowerHouse Web is the new deployment environment from Cognos that enables your users to
access mission-critical applications, built using the proven developer productivity of
PowerHouse 4GL, via any standard Web browser.
Internal corporate users as well as external customers, prospects and suppliers can now be
given a simple, intuitive, graphical user interface to robust applications that requires zero
training. New features introduced with PowerHouse 4GL Version 8.2 enable your developers to
generate an open HTML user interface for both new and existing PowerHouse screen programs.
The generated HTML user interface can be further enhanced with HTML, XML, JavaScript,
VBScript, ActiveX, etc., using either your regular program editor or favorite Web authoring tool,
such as Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. The applications are then deployed
across one or more PowerHouse Web platforms, including the HP e3000, with native access to
all of the traditional data stored there or in any of the supported relational databases.
The PowerHouse Web Dispatcher additionally provides a flexible request distribution and load
balancing mechanism. This ensures that incoming application requests received by your site’s
Web server are quickly executed by a local PowerHouse Web Server process, or else routed to
another PowerHouse Web Dispatcher elsewhere in your network for execution by a remote
PowerHouse Web Server. And security for your Web-based transactions is provided through the
use of industry standards such as SSL and HTTPS.
24