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FOCUS is a figurer programming language. Information technology is a linguistic communication used to build database queries, and is regarded as a 4th-generation programming language(4GL). Produced by Information Builders Inc., information technology was originally developed for data handling and assay on the IBM mainframe. Equally newer systems were adult and smaller computers became more powerful, the available platforms for FOCUS were extended to personal computers and in 1997, to the World Wide Spider web in the WebFOCUS product.

Relation to other 4GLs[link]

RAMIS, the kickoff 4GL, was the direct ancestor of FOCUS, having been principally developed by Gerald Cohen and Peter Mittleman while working at Mathematica Products Group in 1970. The product was sold by Mathematica to a number of in-house clients (including Nabisco and AT&T), and was besides offered by the National CSS timesharing company for use on their VP/CSS operating system (a derivation of IBM's CP/CMS which is now called VM/CMS). In 1970, Cohen decided to leave Mathematica and form Data Builders, after which he recreated the product he had congenital at Mathematica in the form of FOCUS which was released in 1975. The syntax of FOCUS in its simplest elements is almost a direct clone of the syntax of RAMIS bearing a resemblance similar to the differences between various early dialects of SQL). At the same time, NCSS decided to piece of work on its own product, later chosen NOMAD. All 3 products flourished during the 1970s and early on 1980s, just Mathematica's time ran out in the mid-80s, and NCSS also failed, a victim of the personal computing revolution which obviated commercial timesharing (although it has since been revived in the form of ASPs and shared spider web servers). RAMIS was sold through to several companies, ultimately landing with Computer Associates. NOMAD suffered a similar fate. FOCUS, under Cohen'southward management, continued to flourish by expanding their product.

Loosely competitive with SAS, FOCUS never quite reached the same degree of mainstream adoption, mayhap because information technology had only basic analytical and statistical functions and lacked the wide array of specialized analytic tools which made SAS the standard in fields such as pharmaceutical clinical trials. Instead, FOCUS concentrated on farthermost flexibility in data import and export likewise as ad hoc end-user reporting.

Description[link]

Released in 1975, FOCUS resembles other information admission and assay languages such as SQL and SAS, simply also includes report and chart display and presentation features. FOCUS assumes a default file structure, and automates the procedure of identifying files to the operating system, opening the input file, reading the next record, opening the output file, writing the next record, and closing the files. This basic performance allows the user/programmer to concentrate on the details of working with the data within each record, in event working nearly entirely within an implicit program loop that runs for each record. Other procedures operate on the dataset as a whole, for case press or statistical analysis, and just crave the user/developer to identify the dataset.

Compared to full general-purpose programming languages, this structure allows the user/programmer to be less familiar with the technical details of the data and how it is stored, and relatively more than familiar with the data contained in the information. This blurs the line between user and programmer, appealing to individuals whose work roles are in business or research rather than it. This in turn has the double edged result of allowing rapid answers to business concern or research questions, even ones requiring several iterations to get from the initial results to a final respond; just likewise can contribute to the structure of a big trunk of poorly written and/or difficult to maintain source code.

FOCUS features the power for the user to construct a data clarification file (called a "master file description") referring to the actual data file, or even several different data description files addressing the same data file in different ways, rather than the usual practise of having the file construction hard-coded into the program. In this way, files of any construction from whatsoever source can be accessed or produced in many different ways, eliminating much of the data manipulation (for example concatenation, or parsing) commonly required with other earlier programming languages to change variable formats or information structures. For instance, the same actual information file can be accessed (read or write) as each record being an 80 byte text string, or as 40 ii character numerical fields, other as x eight-byte floating point numbers, etc., by the user merely re-writing the advisable master file description equally needed.

In 1997, a web-based version of FOCUS was introduced chosen "WebFOCUS" which built on the information access and reporting foundation of FOCUS, expanding these to a visually oriented thin-client paradigm accessible from any web browser.

In 2005, Information Builders consultants, working with JPMorgan Chase, developed a 4GL translator that could automatically replace legacy NOMAD programs with the WebFOCUS product. ComputerWorld honored this BI consolidation automation with a Laureate Accolade in 2006. Similar translation capabilities are beingness added to the BI translator for converting the other legacy 4GLs, such as RAMIS and FOCUS.