It may be hard to fathom, but when this decade started, we were all developing Essbase cubes in Application Manager and automating them through EssCMD. While we all had our reasons for loving Application Manager (I still miss being able to paste members from Excel right into an outline), the simple fact is that it looked like a Windows 3.1 application. EssCMD was getting so complicated that it was turning into a programming language in its own right yet it couldn’t do a lot of the things a real programming language could.
EAS (Essbase Administration Services which replaced Application Manager) and MaxL (which replaced EssCMD) were first released back in the Essbase 6.5 days and predominantly due to their lack of functionality, the adoption rate was slow at first. By the end of the decade, though, no one would think of going back to AppMan and EssCMD.
