Does anyone else program in ObjectStar (formerly known as Huron)

Question

Huron was a 4GL that originated in the IBM 360 worldframe world in the early 1990s, created and marketed by Amdahl Corporation . It had its own interpreted language and database that people loved or hated, and its most notable features were its unusual rule language syntax and its tight integration with the query language, where you had to code your own nested loops to create Join.

With the appropriate use of indirection (for example, its archetypal "CALL TABLE.RULE") it was possible to quickly create extremely compact, elegant and extensible solutions. Perhaps in the wrong hands to create nightmarish incomprehensible monsters, which, unfortunately, spread and did nothing for his reputation.

It was renamed and renamed ObjectStar in the mid-1990s, ported to Unix and Windows NT and received a user interface component with which it was possible to create client-server applications driven by events that would run unchanged on Windows or Unix.

He never received the critical mass necessary to become a tool for the development of a higher level, and around the turn of the millennium he was largely exhausted.

In retrospect, this is something historical; so my question is:

Does anyone still use it?

Or even heard of it?

Answer 1

I know at least two companies in Belgium that still use it. Now it is owned by TIBCO and is called Object Service Broker.

Answer 2

Now it belongs to Tibko. Pretty sure Tesco in the UK uses it. In Australia, there are about 5 sites, including banks and government departments, including one site supported by disgraced Satyam. Also used in banking in New Zealand. Pretty sure that banks will be re-planned as soon as possible.

Answer 3

Probably Satyam, who kept asking me to educate my people at O ​​* so that they could then pass them on to their clients with experienced and experienced people .....

It is still around, I just got it again on my windows boxes. On Windows, it has much lower costs than SQL Server, it works much better. Unlike C and all its derivatives, you can also read the code. As for those banks that will be "rescheduled as soon as possible" - this probably gives us O * people another 10 years. As a rule, the transition from a platform that is supported and works well for PC reasons (the right platform) is much lower in Bank priorities than the creation and deployment of the latest business application or legislative changes.

Answer 4

I used to work for Amdahl in consulting groups that developed applications for many clients here in the states. It’s quite easy to pick up and very powerfully return in the early 90s for what he could do at that time. RAD and JAD were big words that day. It was truly called a great middleware product that allowed you to move data from MF to the OS. The biggest problem, and then the qualified resources for the solution architecture, as well as the database component, was rather slow in large installations. I would be surprised if many installations in states remain.

Answer 5

I have Huron / ObjectStar and Amdahl to thank me for hosting me around the world for 10 years between 1993 and 2003. Then, unfortunately, I looked up, and the world left me behind. So now I am a business analyst who sucks for those heady days of development.

Answer 6

Anil, I have been working with O * since 1995 (on and off), including integration with Tibco Business Works. There is also experience in Java EE (architect and programmer - WebSphere and JBoss ...). What is the Sydney opportunity? [e-mail] Thanks

Answer 7

I worked on Huron, working on AT & T, and then quit working for several clients after it was renamed ObjectStar. We have developed quite a few applications using ObjectStar. The Sheraton reservation system was written in ObjectStar at a time. Wakefern Food Corp in New Jersey used it, Disney also used it. I was working on a telemarketing application, and we ran it on Unix, supporting 900 concurrent users, which was pretty big for ObjectStar at the time. I have not heard anyone use it since 1998.

Answer 8

I was an ObjectStar developer (now called Tibco OSB) in Toronto for almost 20 years until February 09, when Tibko let me go. Immediately after I left Blue Cross Blue Shield of Delaware, I bought a set of Tibco products solely because of OSB access to IMS mainframe data. If not for OSB, Tibco would not have won the contract.

So yes, it’s still there, but not so much.

Answer 9

Wow, someone is asking about ObjectStar! I worked at Amdahl in the UK as a Huron / ObjectStar trainer from 1991 to 1998, based on the pretty wonderful Dogmersfield Park in the UK, and it covered me too: in one drunk 13-week period I trained people in 10 different countries reached exhaustion before sending home to sleep for a week. Amdahl was the best company I have ever worked for, and introduced me to the best manager I have ever been (Hi Carole) and the best work experiences I have ever had. (Yes, I miss!)

The software was very good, with great pleasure to work, completely different from everything else, and fantastic to teach - you never saw so many light bulbs that appeared over people's heads when they passed through more and more powerful implementation waves, just what they could do with this deceptively powerful toolbox. The huge shame that ObjectStar never reached critical mass. I worked in the UK for the Cluster of ObjectStar International for six months in the UK before it was sold to Tibco, and as far as I know, the guys are still there somewhere in Tibco. Hello to all the thousands that I had to train O *. Three coaches from the UK and Ireland are still in contact, and one of the Canadians, too.

Answer 10

I would be a Canadian with whom Dave S. is still talking. And I heartily repeat many of his comments. The best boss I ever had, the product took me all over the world, and it was really fun to learn. I once made a mistake telling my manager (another) that I could gladly teach Objectstar for the rest of my career, and poof !, I got a reorganization from teaching when the company made the first of many cuts. I still like software, a year ago I completed a six-month contract for an American company helping them with some of the design and programming modules for a component of the Tibco-based OSB system. I still lend myself to short-term teaching contracts, but nothing ever comes to my senses ...

Answer 11

Yes, I am one of the Amdahl trainers (although I would not have known about this topic if Dave had not pointed me in that direction). Hi Beth, Hi Carol, Hi Dave (again!) ...

I programmed in Huron after I was promised that I would never have to cut the line of code again, and then finished there to become a trainer. Yes, I completely enjoyed the problem of working with a product that did not have an if statement (and no source code!). The rule language really was a powerful package after you adapted to the paradigm. Of course, the lifestyle as an ObjectStar coach was good too. I fell from Mount Whitney, crashed my Hertz car somewhere near Lake Huron (where else?), As well as many other adventures during spending!

The main reason for the death of O * was almost certainly the fact that Amdahl sellers were not able to figure out how to sell it. Most of the sales were actually realized at the end, finding an influential specialist in the IT department of the client, who can be transformed by a trainer / consultant at the pre-sale stage and act as a missionary for his colleagues. The way he worked for M&S for sure! He died officially when Fujitsu took a majority stake in Amdahl and abandoned everything that didn't make money.

I can’t believe that someone we taught would even dream of writing monsters of spaghetti esque. The possibilities of indirect and reuse were to make such a result very perverse!

Answer 12

Test drive ObjectStar number 4, specified in Ireland. This was my first entry into software engineering training, and it brought me all over Europe and North America. If only other languages ​​and frameworks accepted its simplicity and speed of development.

It was the best team I have ever worked with. The funniest memory was of three European instructors arriving at Heathrow for a flight to Canada. I forgot BA tickets, Brian arrived 6 hours earlier when he thought he was going to Singapore. Since Dave was laughing so much, you can appreciate our lack of empathy when immigration to Canada decided to get him out for special treatment! I think I still have ObjectStar slides that HOSF and Promotions remember!

Answer 13

Peter, I believe that your memory has been destroyed by too many black and white things. Of course, it was Gatwick, and I forgot my passport, so I had to fly out the next day? When I taught in Singapore, I flew with red eyes, starting to study at 8 a.m. and still remember falling asleep, getting up to study at 10 p.m. (clients tried to squeeze a 5-day class for 4 days), but even someone as I generally knew where I was actually trying to get a plane. I think. And the two times that I chose US Immigration at the Toronto Airport to tell them that I was going to teach Certe (remember this?) To Chicago, and not just go on vacation. Dave was too organized to get into such scratches!

Answer 14

Like Huronaut, I would like to work with Objectstar again. The last thing I did was at the PTA in Vienna. As the last technician in Holland and no sales, they closed the business back in 1999. I switched to Oracle (enough work), but not satisfied. For me, this is still the only real programming environment where (after setting up your structure) you can focus on business rules. A toolkit was also developed for creating trees and a reverse rule tree that call other rules (direct or indirect through tables - these IC-16 fields are powerful), search for isolated rules or even isolated substructures, a message about parameter mismatch, etc. That was great. I would like to work with Objectstar again.

Answer 15

Hi Brian. All I can say is that ObjectStar spoils you for anything else except Assembler, of course. I remember those early days very well - I was in my first year (I think) back in 1991 at the good old Dogmersfield and was making a strange battle when the “real” coaches were too busy.

Yes, these “tube” moments were wonderful - I remember one smart young guy who suddenly “received”, muttered: “I need to go and take a walk”, and after half an hour I came back and thickened the whole library of rules is only seven. They also worked.

I am still here, here in New Zealand. Currently, in the 5th year of concluding a contract with BNZ for a period of 3 to 6 months, but since they allow me to work from home and do more or less hours that I like, this is sweet. I must say that this is a great place to live.

Oh yes, and I remember teaching Sytems Administration in Singapore. Man, they pushed me to the performance problem that they had while I was there, so I did 160 hours in 2 weeks - I was wrong for 6 months after that. It was a time when I had to start training at the appointed time after dinner, whether anyone else was in the room or not - the participants went to dinner and were abducted by their managers. I returned an hour before the first 2 days, but they soon learned to return on time.

Happy days, huh?

Answer 16

I don’t know what made me do a global search on ObjectStar, but when this page came out with a relatively recent timestamp, I had to read! It was a pleasant surprise to see updates from so many former colleagues who spoke of good times.

I was one of the first participants in the Daves courses back in 1991, and Huron / ObjectStar has provided me with bread and butter since then for 15 years. It’s a shame that the product never hit a critical mass, it suffered a double blow to the decline in interest in mainframes (should they have been obsolete by now?) And the growing interest in buying non-build over do-it-yourself. Its availability on other platforms helped a little, but there was too much established competition.

I believe that if I developed the specialization, it would be the last in performance analysis and tuning, confirmed by the discovery that if I try to find poorly executed code, fixing it was often trivial and saving CPU is phenomenal, I always remember that my record was A 99.95% CPU reduction in long-term performance from a one-line code change, but saving over 90% was not unusual. It was a difficult but exciting job, a great change from the relatively simple everyday tasks of SysAdmin that I actually worked for.

Gratitude is presented in many shapes and sizes - they showed me the door in 2006, and since then I have been coding IF statements. However, not a week later, when I do not want me to still have access to the Workbench for one reason or another. It was simply the best environment for any adhoc data analysis I have ever used. His shame Ive had to channel all the knowledge and experience Id created over the years, but I think that progress ...

So, for those of you who are still working with him, you have my envy, make sure you make the most of it!

Regards and best wishes to all, Raj

Answer 17

I was at the 1st Huron presentation at S'vale and became a technical specialist in Scandinavia until the other Scandinavian guys reached speed. Wonderful time, there were projects in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Sydney and various places in Europe. Do you know that the original inventor of Huron was the Dane? I obviously point this out because I myself, Danish, knew this guy personally.

It was a wonderful time and I really miss him. As someone said: When you know O *, there is no other programming language than Assembler, of course. Now I retired, but really miss the "Good old days!"