Cognos Axiant 4GL

Axiant 4GL in a PowerHouse Environment

Building Business Systems

Axiant 4GL’s powerful visual development environment is the answer for developing business-critical applications to run your enterprise. With its rich built-in application models, and advanced specification language, you can rapidly build both PC-based applications and server-centric, transaction-intensive operational applications—all from a single development environment.

Today, your business-critical applications must:

• Support complete business functions from Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and batch processing to production reporting

• Leverage the processing power of both clients and servers

• Deliver true portability across multiple databases and server platforms

• Integrate with existing environments

• Offer ease of development, maintenance, and use

With its unique depth of functionality, Axiant offers the highest developer and application productivity available.

Maximize Developer Productivity
Building core operational business systems is quick and easy using Axiant’s remarkable visual development environment. Moreover, developers can build an application just once and deploy it to multiple platforms and databases simultaneously.

Data-Driven Development
Axiant supports a data-driven development model, which means you can produce applications that accurately reflect the underlying data structure. This allows you to model your business requirements right into your data definitions, and have them represented consistently throughout the application.

Built-in Application Models
Reflecting the built-in intelligence it has inherited from PowerHouse, the world’s leading 4GL, Axiant generates the core code of your application automatically. Since little or no new coding is needed, development time is dramatically reduced.

How does it work? At the heart of the Axiant architecture are built-in models of screens, production reports, and volume transactions. Axiant takes on the fundamental tasks required to develop them, so that you can focus on the business-unique components that need to be added. For instance, Axiant handles the common and repetitive processes related to OLTP, production reporting, and batch processing—like automatically knowing how to find, delete, and change records, or do lookups and batch balancing. In other words, once you tell Axiant what to do, it knows how to do it. Your time is then freed up to concentrate on specific business requirements and processes.

Integration with Existing Environments
Your investment in new or legacy systems and software packages is protected. Axiant offers native support and concurrent access to major hardware vendor systems and most leading databases. Applications can be deployed across MPE/iX, OpenVMS, UNIX, and Windows operating systems. You can incorporate existing code modules written in C, C++, COBOL, BASIC, or other 3GLs.

Powerful Client/Server Development
Axiant allows developers to work independently on their PCs and use the server as a multi-user repository and creation environment for application components. This means you can build and test applications completely in the PC environment and then compile your application on the server of your choice. So you have to flexibility to work in a team environment or "go mobile"—and work on your own.

For PowerHouse users, Axiant includes robust, built-in migration and import utilities that facilitate moving PowerHouse applications to new client/server environments. The cost and time of rewriting applications is avoided and existing investments are leveraged.

Object-Based Repository
The major benefits of object-oriented technology—inheritance and reuse—are delivered without the need to learn object-oriented programming languages.

A shared and unified repository allows for storage of the data dictionary, application logic, relational data definitions, and forms—making it easy for you to manage development projects. What’s more, the repository is the central point for team development projects. When programmers have completed work in their individual workspaces, the contents are stored back into the repository. So every programmer with access to that repository can see the results.

Security issues are not a concern. The repository allows objects to be locked, ensuring that programmers don’t delete someone else’s work.

Maximize Application Productivity through Advanced Deployment Capabilities
Axiant gives you the flexibility to exploit today’s mixed computing environments: different servers, multiple data sources, PC and/or terminal user interfaces. This way, you can optimize application processing across these resources, and re-deploy easily under a different configuration as the need arises.

Flexible, Scalable Client/Server Deployment
An application can be deployed in a variety of configurations simultaneously:

• Server Only: The user interface, application, and data processing are all on the server.

• Thin Client: The user interface processing is on the client; the application and data processing are on the server.

• Fat Client: The user interface and the application processing are on the client; the data processing is on the server.

• Mobile: A distributed, stand-alone application where user interface processing, and a replicated database of the required data run on a PC; the data is synchronized with the server when needed.

Axiant 4GL applications are not locked into any single topology. For instance, the fat-client deployment configuration of a small work group application can easily be reconfigured to a thin-client configuration should you need to scale the application up to support larger data volumes or an increased number of users.

The key benefit behind thin-client and server-only topologies lies with transaction-intensive functions. As such, OLTP, complex updates, volume updates, batch processing, production reporting, and data packaging can reside on the server where processing power, security, and reliability can be leveraged. Conversely, applications requiring light updates can reside on the PC using fat-client or mobile topologies.

Cross-Platform and Multi-Database Support
If your enterprise has a mixed operating environment, you require access to more than one database, and you need to deploy your applications across a range of platforms. With Axiant, you can access and update multiple relational and non-relational databases simultaneously and deploy your applications across multiple platforms, servers, and Pcs.

Technical Specifications for Axiant 4GL and its Associated PowerHouse Servers
Axiant Development Platforms

Home | Legal Notices | Privacy Statement | Site Map
Performance Management | Business Intelligence | RSS Feeds

Copyright © 2008 Cognos ULC (formerly Cognos Inc.), an IBM Company. All rights reserved.

Cognos is a world leader in business intelligence, performance management, data integration, enterprise risk management, olap reporting, analytics software, bank branch profitability, retail performance management, supply chain visibility, customer profitability, Oracle business intelligence, and balanced scorecarding for the enterprise.