Here are some articles about my COBOL framework which were published in the HPworld magazine:
In the middle of 1988 we were commissioned by Tim Cullis, the editor of the HPworld magazine, to write an Invoicing program so that he could construct invoices which could then be posted into CODA-IAS, an Integrated Accounting System which ran on the HP3000 mini-computer. As we had already written several projects which had interfaces to this system for other clients it was a straightforward task for us.
Before he took delivery of the software he asked for a demonstration on our premises, and he was very surprised at the short time it took for us to develop it. He took a look at the database schema, and I remember the note of surprise in his voice when he remarked "You've normalised the database!" to which I replied "Doesn't everybody?" He then asked how we had developed this software so quickly, and when I explained how we used an in-house framework to provide standard facilities such as a login screen, dynamic menus and Role Based Access Conrol (RBAC), plus a library of common routines to handle repetitive tasks, he seemed suitably impressed. He took away the source code so that he could examine it further at his leisure, and very quickly got back to me with a request that I write an article on this framework as he felt that it would be a worthy topic of interest for his readers in the HP3000 community. This article was published in 3 parts.
One of the recent additions to our programming team came from a company that used the PowerHouse 4GL software (QUIZ, QUICK and QTP) to build their applications, and he remarked that he had found that he could develop programs faster using my framework built in a 3GL language than he could with this shiny new 4GL language. It was he who came up with the name "4th Generation COBOL" which was used in this article.
| Part 1 | 1988 December | COBOL STRIKES BACK: Can COBOL development speed match 4GLs? |
| Part 2 | 1989 March | 4GL COBOL: The controversy continues |
| Part 3 | 1989 October | 4th Generation COBOL - part 3 |