MAPPER
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- This article is about 4GL software. For other meanings, see Mapper (disambiguation).
MAPPER (MAintain, Prepare, and Produce Executive Reports) is a database management and reporting system that includes the world's first 4GL. Developed inhouse by the Sperry Corporation, MAPPER's heritage dates back to the 1960s when Louis Schlueter conceived of the CRT RPS (Report Processing System, to differentiate it from RPG) as a means to help Sperry/Univac manage disparate activities involved with coordinating hardware and software development, with identifying and meeting requirements for new systems, and with maintaining existing systems. [1] [2].
CRT RPS became MAPPER in 1975. That proving ground, plus the development of the UNIVAC 1100, and pressure from customers, most notablt Sante Fe railroad, led to a release for more general use in 1979. [3] MAPPER was intended for End-user computing from the beginning, and was the first to use more advanced techniques. MAPPER applied a powerful cabinet and drawer metaphor to handle directories and files. Data was represented in a 'row and column' framework which pre-dated spreadsheet methods. High-level commands allowed easy programming.
An early major use of MAPPER was by the Santa Fe railroad to track its freight cars, which involved large-scale data handling and real-time transactions. The development was done by railroad management experts, not programmers, and realized a productivity improvement of 8-to-1. In addition, the approach was ahead of its time in using rapid prototyping and a 4GL (4th-Generation Language).
In 1986, the Sperry European Center for Artificial Intelligence, headed by Carlos Fdez. Esteban, began a project (headed by Martyn Richard Jones) to build an Expert Systems application development environment in MAPPER (code-named MAPPER/ESD). The working prototype was completed by May 1987, and was the first tightly integrated database and artificial intelligence technology anywhere in the world. A technological breakthrough that contained a sophisticated rules editor and inference engine at the conceptual level of the data dictionary, this development would later be embedded in Unisys Airline and Government applications.
MAPPER is supported on a number of platforms, including the Univac 1100 and Sperry 2200 mainframes, Unisys A-Series mainframes, Unix, Windows NT, Windows PCs, and most recently a version for LINUX.
In the mid 1980s Sperry actively marketed MAPPER, including advertising featuring "MAPPER Man", the self-empowered executive end-user. In the Scandinavian countries, Sperry even had a MAPPER song - "Do it the MAPPER way!" (1983) - written and performed by an ABBA style group.
A 1989 survey by Unisys showed that 140 of 224 UNIVAC 1100 customers were using MAPPER. By 2006 there were more than 600 sites using MAPPER for Windows NT.
Today, MAPPER is in use by thousands of sites worldwide. It has seen a number of modernization upgrades, and was renamed Unisys Business Information Server (BIS), although diehard MAPPER lovers still refer to it as MAPPER. MAPPER can run websites with its own .asp front end, has an integrated JavaScript engine, can produce XML for B2B, and is able to manipulate SOAP objects. It is a RAD development tool, producing applications very quickly. MAPPER comes with its own very powerful database, and can be linked to a variety of others, including Oracle and SQLserver. You can do things in MAPPER with two statements that would take pages of code in other languages. In the industry, it is known as Unisys’ best kept secret.
[edit] External links
- Professor Bird's article on MAPPER - [1] - This is an article on the internet published by Professor M. Bird at DeVry University of South Florida where he discusses that the MAPPER database management system, regardless of the name, has been a successful database and will continue to thrive over the years by remaining ahead of its time. As presented in this article, the MAPPER database management system has been strong in the Unisys client community and remained successful, even with its rename to BIS, by evolving to meet the changing conditions and needs of the business community.
[edit] References
- ^ MAPPER Collection, 1983-1996
- ^ Early motivation (Gerry Del Fiacco)
- ^ MAPPER and UNIVAC
- Louis Schlueter, User-Designed Computing: The Next Generation, 1988. [book on report generator and MAPPER systems]
