DP2, the 4GL.

DP2 is a multi-platform 4GL development and maintenance system. DP2 is the tool for the professional software developper in the 4GL environment of the Siemens BS2000 mainframes. It facilitates efficient application development and maintenance for many different production environments like Bull DPS/7 and UNIX.

Central system inventory.

In DP2 all details about data and applications are stored in the central system inventory. These registrations are the base for all sources, screen forms, library management, job control, etc., which are generated, compiled, linked and executed. The system inventory data is also used to generate the technical documentation and the base of the user manual of the application. The figure below shows a simplified structure of DP2.

Iterative development process.

Not only the sources and documentation for the applications are generated, but starting from the description of the data structures to be used by an application and the application structure itself a complete prototype of the application can be generated as well. In an iterative development process the needed application can be had by refining the specifications in cooperation with the application's users.

In general the biggest part of an application's lifetime is the maintenance phase. The iterative development process has been tested for a long time on many applications and has proven to gain substantional savings in terms of elaps time and manhours.

Portability.

Because of portatibity to other platforms DP2 uses the programming language COBOL in the source generation process. While these generated COBOL sources as such are nothing than an intermediate product in the generation phase they can be stored for the "worst case" scenario.

Such a "worst case" scenario could be the porting of the applications to another platform, although most will have another opinion. In case that platform is at that time not supported by DP2, the structured design of the with DP2 developped applications will make for a simple port to that platform.

Proven technology.

DP2 has since 1981 proven to be an effective tool for the development and maintenance of small and big applications. It has not only be used for the development and maintenance of large parts of our products like MOAP and MTPM, but even more for big applications of our customers.

The run-time components of systems like MOAP and MTPM are not developped with DP2. Because of performance reasons these time critical components are written in the Siemens BS2000 Assembler programming language. Though, the user interfaces of such applications are developped and maintained with the use of DP2.