Is anyone still programming in ObjectStar (formerly known as Huron)

Question

Huron was a 4GL that originated in the IBM 360 mainframe world in the early 1990s, created and sold by the Amdahl Corporation. It had a proprietary interpreted language and database that people either loved or loathed, and its most notable features were its unusual Rules Language syntax, and its tight integration with its query language, where you had to code your own nested loops to effect a Join.

With the appropriate use of indirection (such as its archetypal 'CALL TABLE.RULE') it was possible to quickly create exceedingly compact, elegant and extensible solutions. It was also possible, in the wrong hands, to create nightmarish unmaintainable monstrosities that sadly proliferated, and did nothing for its reputation.

It was renamed and rebranded as ObjectStar in the mid 1990s, ported to Unix and Windows NT, and given a UI component with which it was possible to create event-driven client-server applications that would run without modification on Windows or Unix.

It never really gained the critical mass needed to become a top-tier development tool, and around the turn of the millennium it was pretty much fizzling out.

In retrospect, it's something of a historical aberration; hence my question:

Is anyone still using it?

Or has even heard of it?

Answer 1

I know of at least two companies in Belgium who are still using it. It is now owned by TIBCO and is called Object Service Broker

Answer 2

It's now owned by Tibco. Pretty sure that Tesco in UK uses it. Australia has about 5 sites including banks & govt depts, including one site supported by the disgraced Satyam. Also still used in banking in New Zealand. Pretty sure the banks will re-platform as soon as practical.

Answer 3

That's probably the Satyam that kept asking me to train their people in O* so they could then outsource it for their clients with their skilled and experienced people.....

It is still around, I just got it going again on my Windows boxes. On Windows it has a far lower overhead than SQL Server, performs much better. Unlike C and all of the derivatives thereof, you can read the code too. As for those banks who will "re-platform as soon as practical" - that probably gives us O* people another 10 years. Generally, moving from a platform that is supported and works well for PC reasons (platform correct) ranks rather lower on a Bank's priorities than getting the latest business application or legislative change built and deployed.

Answer 4

I used to work for Amdahl on the consulting teams that developed applications for many customers here in the states. Pretty easy to pick up, and very powerful back in the early 90's for what it could do at the time. RAD and JAD was the buzz words back in the day. It was really dubbed a great middleware product, which allowed data movement from MF to OS. Biggest problem back then skilled resources to architect the solution, as well as the database component was rather slow in larger installs. I'd be surprised if many installs in states remain.

Answer 5

I have Huron / ObjectStar and Amdahl to thank for taking me around the world for 10 years between 1993 and 2003. Then sadly, I looked up and the world had left me behind. So now I'm a business analyst who pines for those heady developing days.

Answer 6

Hey, I am looking for Huron experts in SYDNEY for one of our major IT client. If you guys can help me that would be great.

Answer 7

Anil, I have been working with O* since 1995 (on and off), including integration with Tibco Business Works. Also have JEE experience (architect & programmer - WebSphere and JBoss...). What is the Sydney opportunity? [email protected] Thanks

Answer 8

I worked on Huron while working at AT&T and then left to work for several clients after it was renamed ObjectStar. We developed quite a few very large applications using ObjectStar. Sheratons reservation system was written in ObjectStar at one time. Wakefern Food Corp in NJ was using it, Disney was also using it. I worked on a telemarketing application and we ran it on Unix supporting 900 simultaneous users, which was quite large for ObjectStar at the time. I haven't heard of anyone using it since around 1998.

Answer 9

I was an ObjectStar (now called Tibco OSB) developer in Toronto for almost 20 years until Feb 09 when I was let go by Tibco. Just after I left Blue Cross Blue Shield of Delaware bought a suite of Tibco products solely because of OSB's access to IMS mainframe data. Had it not been for OSB Tibco would not have won the contract.

So yes it's still out there but not a lot of it.

Answer 10

Wow, somebody asking about ObjectStar! I worked for Amdahl in the UK as a Huron/ObjectStar trainer from 1991 to 1998, based at the quite wonderful Dogmersfield Park in the UK, and it took me round the world too: in one heady 13 week period I trained folks in 10 different countries and reached a point of exhaustion before being sent home to sleep for a week. Amdahl was the best company I ever worked for, and introduced me to the best manager I ever had (Hi Carole), and the best experiences at work I ever had. (Yes, I miss it!)

The software was pretty good too, great fun to work with, completely different from anything else around, and fantastic to teach - you never saw so many lightbulbs popping on over people's heads as they went through increasingly powerful waves of realisation of just what they could do with this deceptively powerful toolset. A tremendous shame that ObjectStar never reached critical mass. I worked in the UK for the ObjectStar International "rump" 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. Hi to all the thousands I must have trained in O* too. The three UK and Ireland trainers are still in touch, and one of the Canadians too.

Answer 11

I would be that Canadian that Dave S is still in touch with. And I heartily echo many of his remarks. Best boss I ever had, the product took me all over the world, and teaching it was really fun. One day I made the mistake of telling my manager (a different one) that I could happily teach Objectstar for the rest of my career, and poof!, I got reorganized out of teaching when the company did their first of many downsizings. I still love the software, a year ago I completed a 6-month contract for a US company helping them with some design and programming mods to the OSB component of a Tibco-based system. I still make myself available for short-term teaching contracts, but nothing ever seems to come to fruition...

Answer 12

Yup, I'm another of the Amdahl trainers (though I wouldn't have known about this thread if Dave hadn't pointed me in this direction). Hi Beth, hi Carole, hi Dave (again!)...

I programmed in Huron after I was promised I'd never ever have to cut a line of code ever again, then graduated from there to becoming a trainer. Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of working with a product that had no if statement (and no source code!) - the rules language was indeed a powerful package once you adjusted to the paradigm. The lifestyle as an ObjectStar trainer was certainly good too. I fell off Mt Whitney, trashed my Hertz car somewhere near Lake Huron (where else?) as well as lots of other adventures while on expenses!

The main reason for O*'s demise was almost certainly the fact that Amdahl's salesmen couldn't work out how to sell it. Most sales were actually effected in the end by finding an influential techie in the client IT department who could be converted by a trainer/consultant at the presales stage and act as missionary to his/her colleagues. That's how it worked at M&S for sure! It died officially when Fujitsu took a controlling interest in Amdahl and ditched anything that wasn't making money.

I can't believe that anybody we trained would even dream of writing spaghetti-esque monstrosities. The indirection and reuse capabilities should have made such an outcome very perverse indeed!

Answer 13

ObjectStar trainer number 4 checking in, this one's from Ireland. It was my first entry into software development training and it brought me all over Europe and North America. If only other languages and frameworks adopted it's simplicity and speed of development.

It was the best team I ever worked with. My funniest recollection was the three European instructors arriving in Heathrow for a flight to Canada. I had forgotten my BA tickets, Brian had arrived 6 hours earlier as he thought he was going to Singapore. As Dave laughed so much you can appreciate our lack of sympathy when immigration in Canada decided to pick him out for special treatment! I think I still even have the ObjectStar slides, who remember HOSF and Promotions!

Answer 14

Peter, I reckon your memory has been destroyed by too much of the black-and-white stuff. Surely it was Gatwick and I'd forgotten my passport, so I had to fly out the next day? When I taught in Singapore I flew on the red-eye, starting teaching at 8am and can still remember falling asleep while standing up teaching at 10pm (customers were trying to cram a 5-day class into 4 days) but even someone as accident-prone as me generally knew where I was actually trying to get a plane to. I think. And twas I that got flung out by US Immigration at Toronto Airport for telling them I was going to teach Certe (remember that?) in Chicago rather than just going on holiday. Dave was too bl**dy organised ever to get into those sort of scrapes!

Answer 15

As "Huronaut" I would like to work with Objectstar again. Latest I did was at PTA in Vienna. As the last techie in Holland and no sales they closed down business back in 1999. Switched over to Oracle (enough work) but not happy. For me it still is the only real programming environment where (after setting up your framework) you can focus on business rules. Also developed a toolbox to build trees and reversed trees of rules calling other rules (direct or indirect via tables - those IC-16 fields are powerfull), finding isolated rules or even isolated sub-structures, reporting of parameter mismatch etc. This was great. I would like to work with Objectstar again.

Answer 16

Hi Dave - Hi Brian - All I can say is that ObjectStar spoils you for anything else - except Assembler, of course. I well remember those early days - I was on the first course (I think) back in 1991 at good old Dogmersfield, and did the odd bit of training when the 'real' trainers were too busy.

Yes, those 'lightbulb' moments were great to see - I remember one clever young chap who suddenly 'got it', muttered 'I need to go and take a walk' and half an hour later came back and condensed an entire library of rules into just seven. They worked, too.

I'm still at it, down here in NZ. Currently in the 5th year of a '3 to 6 month' contract with BNZ, but as they let me work from home and do more or less what hours I like, that's sweet. Must say this is a great place to live.

Oh yes - and I remember teaching Sytems Administration in Singapore too. Man, they hauled me into a performance problem they had while I was there, so I did 160 hours in 2 weeks - I wasn't right for 6 months after that. That was the time that I had to resort to starting teaching at the set time after lunch whether there was anybody else in the room or not - the attendees would go off for lunch and be kidnapped by their managers. I got 'em back an hour late the first 2 days, but they soon learned to come back on time.

Happy days, eh?

Answer 17

I don’t know what possessed me to do a global-search on ObjectStar, but when this page popped up with a relatively recent timestamp, I had to have a read! It was a pleasant surprise to see updates from so many ex-colleagues talking about the good times.

I was one of the earlier attendees of Dave’s courses back in 1991, and Huron/ObjectStar provided my bread and butter from then on for 15 years. It’s a shame the product never got to critical mass, it suffered the double whammy of plummeting interest in mainframes (weren’t they supposed to be obsolete by now?) and increasing interest in Buy-Not-Build over Do-It-Yourself. Its availability on other platforms helped a bit, but there was just too much established competition out there.

I suppose if I did develop a specialisation, it was latterly in Performance Analysis and Tuning, borne out of the discovery that if I put in some effort to locate badly-executing code, fixing it was often trivial and the CPU savings phenomenal. I’ll always remember my record was a 99.95% CPU reduction in a long-running job from a single-line code change, but savings of over 90% were not unusual. It was hard but thrilling work, a nice change from the relatively straightforward day-to-day SysAdmin tasks for which I was actually employed.

Gratitude comes in many shapes and sizes - I was shown the door in 2006, and I have been coding IF statements ever since. However, there’s not a week that goes by where I don’t wish I still had access to a Workbench for one reason or another. It was simply the best environment for doing any sort of adhoc data analysis I have ever used. It’s a shame I’ve had to mothball all the knowledge and experience I’d built up over the years, but I guess that’s progress …

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

Regards & Best Wishes to All, Raj

Answer 18

Hi everybody - I was at the 1st presentation of Huron in S'vale and got to be the techie of Scandinavia until the other scandinavian guys came up to speed. Wonderful time, had projects in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Sydney and assorted places in Europe. Did you know that the original inventor of Huron was a Dane? I'm obviously pointing this out because I, myself, is danish and personally knew the guy.

It was a wonderful time and I miss it tremendously. As someone said: When you know O* there is no other programming language - except Assembler, of course. I'm retired now, but really miss the "Good old days!"