Programmers Open Workbench

Simple Oberon-2 programming environment for Microsoft Windows intended primarily for teaching purposes and commonly known as Pow!. Originally developed in the early 1990's in a cooperation between the Forschungsinstitut für Mikroprozessortechnik (FIM) department of Johannes Kepler Universität, in Linz Austria who developed the front end tools and UK embedded compiler developer Robinson Associates who developed the compiler, and the toolkit targeted Windows 3.x. It was later ported to 32 bit windows and the supplied text editor gained rudimentary support for working with Java and C++ as well.

With the port to a 32 bit architecture Johannes Kepler Universität took the lead in developing both the front end and back end even though it was still based on the RA compiler, however when the university decided to refocus their informatics education from generic computer studies to networking technologies, all development of the toolkit stopped virtually overnight around 1999.

The original Pow! environment saw some use on OS/2 since it ran under WinOS/2 and was a simple coherent system that came with a lightweight programming library called Opal, that was easy to learn and free. There were Oberon environments available for OS/2 but they were not native but rather layered the Oberon operating system on top of OS/2 and they also supported only the original Oberon release, while programmers familiar with Modula-2 were much more inclined to want Oberon-2 since it was not quite as severe a change for them as the original release of the language.
 * Use on OS/2

Interest in it mostly died down when native systems became available for OS/2, there was some work done on porting PoW!/32 to OS/2 but license uncertainties discouraged people from putting too much work into it.

Versions

 * Pow! 3.0 (1997)
 * Pow!/32 3.0b (1999)
 * Pow!/32 3.11 (2004)

CGJ is a German grammar school that uses the POW! system for teaching purposes and they released an updated version of POW!/32 around 2006 that solves a number of small niggles with the POW! system and in addition comes with a small set of example programs in German. It is recommended that you use that version on modern versions of MS Windows over and above the official version.
 * Christliches Gymnasium Jena version

There are a few other versions floating around the net that supposedly fix issues with the front end and editor, but most of them lack source and some of them just introduce new problems and in general they should be avoided.
 * Other versions

Languages

 * German and English supplied by default.
 * Additions by Christliches Gymnasium Jena only supplied in German, but this is not critical to the operation of the English version.

Publications

 * Jörg R. Mühlbacher, Bernhard Leisch, Ulrich Kreuzeder, Brian Kirk: Oberon-2 Programming with Windows - Springer 1997, ISBN 3-540-62522-4


 * Articles
 * Pow! - a component based programming environment - Volumes 61-95 of Informatik-Berichte - Johannes Kepler Universität Linz - 1995
 * Ulrich Kreuzeder: POW! - The Programmers Open Workbench. Journal of Systems Architecture 45(11): 909-918 (1999)


 * Tutorials
 * Ryan Kelly: Getting Started with Oberon-2

Links

 * Official POW! homepage

License

 * Open source, the 16 bit version is covered by a no commercial usage clause that specifically allows for its use in education and for personal use but offers commercial licenses from Robinson Associates. The 32 bit version has a conflicting license, the license file supplied with the program says education and for personal use only but the manual and webpage say it can be used at will.