A blast from the past! Years ago I worked on some J2EE nonsense to do e-commerce websites on top of a Pick application. It was I think called Mailbrain, I think running on HPUX though I could be mis-remembering. There was a horrible text based socket protocol for passing data records back and forth.

I do remember the Pick greybeards being dismissive of this new fangled SQL stuff: "we had relational databases before SQL don't you know"