PowerHouse 4GL provides traditional terminal and terminal emulator based syntax development, while Axiant 4GL provides a robust visual IDE for PowerHouse solutions that fully utilize the combined power of a Microsoft Windows UI and UNIX, Linux, Windows and OpenVMS servers.
Axiant enables your developers to create solutions in a Windows based environment, but then deploy them to Windows, Web, or terminal-based users in a variety of flexible and scalable thin-client, fat-client, mobile/standalone, and server-based topologies—according to application need and available infrastructure.
Axiant wraps a sophisticated object-based visual development environment around the PowerHouse engine—so your developers still benefit from the flexibility and speed of this high-powered environment. In addition, Axiant supports object-oriented techniques, such as inheritance and reuse, without the necessity to learn object-oriented programming languages. For example, because the user interface form for each interactive program inherits its visual appearance from a single such form, the style of the user interface for an entire application can be developed and modified by altering objects in the one inherited form. PowerHouse data elements, tables and programs are represented graphically, enabling developers to create applications quickly and pinpoint errors easily.
Axiant utilizes a multi-user object repository to store data definitions, application logic, and user interface forms. This makes it easier to manage team development projects. It also enables developers to save selected portions of a development project onto their own PC and work disconnected from the repository for continued productivity away from the office.
If you are already a PowerHouse customer, Axiant enables you to further protect your existing investments in solutions and developer skills, by re-deploying terminal-based PowerHouse applications as thin-client Windows solutions using your existing UNIX, Linux or OpenVMS servers and data. Axiant also contains sophisticated facilities that can advise on, and help automate, the migration of your server-based PowerHouse applications to new client/server or relational database environments.