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Installation: Free Downloads The H2O Family Install Notes Programming: Prerequisites H2O Whitepaper Online Manual Code Examples H2O Free Support |
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What's H2O? H2O is programming made for the web. What's it like? H2O is English-like. If you know some Perl, VB, ASP, or PhP you'll be immediately productive in H2O. It runs on Linux, Mac, Unix, and Windows. How do I try it? Download H2O for free. Get it from hosting providers. Or buy on-line. Where does H2O come from? The language was invented by Aestiva. H2O stands for: HTML with HTML/OS Overlays. |
| H2O's 4GL Database The world's best database architecture has re-emerged. H2O includes a powerful 4GL database -- the first 4GL created for operation in browsers. For those of you tired of SQL, H2O's 4GL is sure to lift your spirits. 4GL stands for "Fourth Generation Language." It's not a new concept. Before the world wide web, 4GLs proved themselves faster, easier to program, and more capable than IBM's SQL technology. 4GL technology was so powerful, it was adopted by every major database company. But when the web came along the computer industry retreated to SQL because, frankly speaking, 4GL technology takes years to develop and they had no time. Today however, the world's most powerful database architecture has re-emerged. It's in H2O and it will blow you away. SQL, which stands for Standard Query Language, was invented by IBM in the 1970s. SQL technology is old. It was not designed for browser-based environments. What exactly is 4GL? 4GL, or Fourth Generation Language, is a high-level way of looking at databases. The 4GL approach is one that says "data should flow into and out of databases as easily as you bring data into and out of variables." The 4GL architecture hides low-level tasks relating to locking and connectivity. It looks like a simple set of functions in an already-existing language. The beauty of a 4GL is it's simplicity -- only one function per database task. One function to load a record into an HTML form. One function to update a record from data submitted in an HTML form. One function to add, delete or search through records. And so on. One function per database task. Since most database-driven applications involve adding, editing, deleting, and searching databases, 4GLs reduce database programming to its bare minimum. More importantly, 4GLs can be faster than SQL-based databases. This is especially true in H2O where the 4GL is compiled into its binary kernel. A single function like DBFIND will query a database, extract a requested block of data, put it into a variable so it's immediately ready for use (no datatyping required), and also extract (and make readily available) other statistics about the query so additional queries to the database are not needed. It is also worth mentioning that H2O's entire binary kernel is smaller than many database drivers. As a result, DBFIND is very fast. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of H2O's 4GL database is it has no need for a database server. It acheives speeds comparible to the worlds most powerful database engines without the need for this extra component. As a result, H2O's database engine is maintenance-free. With no seperate server to set up there's no seperate server to maintain. Plus, there's no seperate server to install, upgrade, or learn. Also, because there's no database server component, there's no seperate server component to fail or "go down." In other words, H2O is more "robust." More powerful too As you see, there's a reason why database companies adopted the 4GL approach over SQL more than ten years ago. It was a better approach. And not only because of the reasons outlined above. Unlike SQL, 4GL's are not limited by the standards imposed by SQL. For example, the H2O database engine allows for intra-field indexing, natural language indexing, and other capabilities not included in the SQL standard.
H2O's 4GL Advantage Next steps.. As a next step we recommend you read the book Advanced Web Sites Made Easy. The book is written for beginners and includes information on H2O's 4GL. Although the title of the book says it's for HTML/OS, please note that early versions of this book predated H2O but are perfectly appropriate, since H2O and HTML/OS use the same language. |