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A Review of Alpha Five v10 Developer

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A Review of Alpha Five v10 Developer

Since version 5, Alpha 5 has less emphasis on standalone databases, and more on Web applications. Alpha Five v10 Developer lets you create Web apps that are Ajax based, even if you don’t have much programming experience. Even those it’s intended for those without much skill in coding, it’s still not a walk in the park for your average user. Getting the maximum out of it requires a decent knowledge of tables, forms, fields, and databases. Lacking that, it would take both patience and time to master. Luckily, there are great help resources on Alpha Software’s website, as well as in the software itself. If you’re not a programming expert, you’ll probably need some assistance to get started.

Alpha Five v10 has a number of options for desktop and Web environments. Alpha Five v10 Developer is the standard. There are also Alpha V Runtime, for deploying desktop applications, Alpha Five v10 Application Server, with a module server for the deployment of Web applications, and the All-In-One bundle. Each edition of Alpha Five v10 is compatible with Windows 2008 Server, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP.

Alpha Five v10 doesn’t have quite the userfriendliness of FileMaker Pro 11, which walks you through every aspect of creating databases in a point-and-click environment. Alpha Five v10 makes use of wizards, which they call Genies, for a lot of tasks, in a way similar to Microsoft Access.

Actually, Access makes a better comparison to Alpha Five v10 than either Intuit’s QuickBase or Filemaker, as it also takes you fairly soon into obscure areas – data types, table fields, and other advanced development and database concepts. Both Filemaker and QuickBase are great for putting a database together quickly, and basic database design, but neither offer the level of control that Alpha Five v10 does.

If you have experience with SQL, Crystal Reports, and Front Page, you should have no problems. Novices shouldn’t necessarily be discouraged, but the learning curve for Alpha Five is pretty steep.

The impetus behind Alpha Five v10 Developer is Ajax, which is a group of Web development technologies used for creating Web applications with interactivity. Some well-known sites that were created using Ajax are Microsoft’s Live.com, Google Maps, Box.net and Gmail. Ajax isn’t only for the tech giants, though; many smaller businesses use Ajax applications to add chat functionality, visitor polls, and other features to their websites.

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1 Comment

  1. I have been building AJAX web database apps with alpha five for about a year now. Wow – this product really does cut the development time dramatically for building web apps. I am done with php

  2. I work for P & G and we have boat load of Access apps that we need to take to the web. We tried the MS recommended solution of connecting to Sharepoint but frankly that was a waste of time because performance was poor and Sharepoint wont publish Access apps with VBA.

    A friend recommended Alpha Five. I am glad she did. It does a great job in letting us take our Access data and after upsizing to SQL server, we have been building very fast and very robust web and intranet apps in Alpha Five very quickly. You can count me in as one very happy bunny.

    BTW the Alpha Five folks have said that they are adding a new layer to Alpha Five that will let me build apps that run on ALL mobile devices that look and feel and behave like native mobile apps but it will all be done with HTML5/CSS3/Javascript. This is very important for us because we dont have the time or the budget to build the same app over and over again for each mobile device

  3. Great info on this post. Bookmarked it! Will come back again…..

  4. super ,,smashing,, great,, thanks for the excellent information you have provided..
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