Pro-IV

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Pro-IV is a Fourth-generation programming language, now owned by Northgate Information Solutions. It has a small but active community of developers, probably numbering between 1,000 and 5,000 worldwide.

Pro-IV usual application domain is database-centric business applications. Pro-IV has some similarities to languages such as ABAP, FOCUS and RPG.

Pro-IV programs consist of declarative/non-procedural specifications that control the overall structure of the program and database access and that have an implicit sequence of execution (which Pro-IV programmers refer to as the timing cycle). Procedural subroutines can be added by the programmer and these are written in a 3GL-like language which Pro-IV calls "Logic".

Note that in Pro-IV, programs are referred to as "functions" which can be confusing as it differs from the more usual use of that term in programming languages

1 History
2 Features
3 Strengths
4 Weaknesses
5 Major Applications
6 External links

[edit] History

Pro-IV was developed by Sushil Garg working in Hawaii in 1976 on a General Automation System. In the early 1980's it was licensed to McDonnell Information Systems (MDIS).

MDIS Converted Pro-IV to run on their Pick-based systems and this spin off was known as ALL (Application Language Liberator).

In the early years Pro-IV was ported to several different platforms by separate teams. Sushil Garg brought these portations together as one company named Pro Computer Sciences (PCS). PCS was subsequently acquired by MDIS.

Pro-IV's heyday was probably the second half of the 1980's. There was a Pro-IV team entered in the 4GL Grand Prix contests of 1987, 1988 and 1990 and the product finished second on each occasion.

[edit] Features

Pro-IV supports a wide variety of operating systems by virtue of a write once, run anywhere virtual machine model similar to Java.

[edit] Strengths

Server-side Pro-IV applications are highly portable with only a small degree of care on the part of the programmer. Server platform technology supported in current releases includes Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and OpenVMS plus Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Pervasive SQL, RMS, VSAM and CISAM. Pro-IV also runs on IBM iSeries and on IBM mainframes.

Once programmers are familiar with Pro-IV then, consistent with the nature of Pro-IV as a 4GL, productivity in Pro-IV's intended application domains is typically high and programmers can be effective even without extensive technical skills/knowledge.

Applications implemented in Pro-IV are typically runtime-efficient and perform well. Scalability is also typically good with only a little care on the part of the programmer.

[edit] Weaknesses

Pro-IV is a non-mainstream technology and as such may not be appropriate for new application development or for IT environments committed to particular mainstream architectures.

Pro-IV has little or no object-orientation and makes only a limited amount of procedural abstraction available to the programmer. Pro-IV has little support for analytical/statistical/mathematical functions, for example it does not include basic trigonometric functions.

The Pro-IV-supplied "GUI client" which renders the rich-client UI for applications written in Pro-IV is based around ActiveX technology and works only on Windows client platforms. Consequently, the more-recent programmers' development environments supplied with Pro-IV also work only on a Windows client platform.

Pro-IV has no inbuilt support for Interprocess Communication (IPC) mechanisms, although this can be added via the ability to extend the Pro-IV kernel in C.

The Pro-IV "Bus and Task" technology allowing "service calls" into a Pro-IV application from other systems is proprietary rather than based on an existing standard for RPC or some similar mechanism.

There is no formal/rigorous definition of the syntax or semantics of Pro-IV available to programmers, which can make problem resolution difficult for the inexperienced.

[edit] Major Applications

In India, major Pro-IV applications are in the Telecom, Insurance and Manufacturing/Inventory management domains.
In Sweden, major Pro-IV applications are in the Telecom domain.
In Australia, major Pro-IV applications are in the Financial domain.
In the USA, major Pro-IV applications are in the Manufacturing, Financial and Construction domains.
In the UK, major Pro-IV applications are in the Financial, Media and Transport/Logistics domains
In Italy, major Pro-IV applications are in the Manufacturing domain.

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