Alpha Software

For newer blog posts...

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Heller) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 18:48:23 PDT

...see http://blog.alphasoftware.net

Also note that you'll have to sign up for the RSS feed on the new blog if you want it, as the old feed won't carry over from here.

What does the Titanic and icebergs have to do with the market expansion being caused by Tablets?

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 10:31:57 PDT

As you may know, the very talented team of developers at Alpha has been burning the midnight oil in order to bring a truly exciting platform to the market for rapidly building cross-platform data-driven mobile apps based on the Alpha Five foundation.

As you might expect, we are talking to customers and analysts continously to better understand the needs of customers, and we read a lot on the topic.

It was then with a certain element of surprise that we came across an article comparing the tablet to the Titanic that went beyond statistics and dry MBA-speak and in very clear and compelling terms summed up why the tablet is so important; important not really as a replacement of the desktop/laptop, but rather as an instrument of market expansion!

"Most tech pundits are confused about the Tablet computer. They compare the abilities of the PC (traditional notebook and desktop computers) to those of the Tablet and find the Tablet wanting. They can’t understand how the Tablet can be so dog gone popular when it makes for such a terrible PC.

"What they don’t understand is that the tablet isn’t trying to be a PC (unless it’s the Microsoft Surface). Tablet sales are exploding because the Tablet is competing against…nothing. The Tablet is going where the PC is weak and where the PC is absent. There’s virtually nothing standing in the tablet’s way."

The author does a great job in explaining his theory of why the tablet is truly a game changer and I think it will give you some ideas for applications you might want to build. These are truly exciting times to be in the application development business!

I hope you enjoy reading the article.

How to write a charting application from a Web service

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Heller) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 12:30:46 PDT

Alpha Software used to position its products as database application development tools. The way our Ajax Grid and Report engine are designed, that was largely true: you couldn't get much built unless you had a database, be it SQL or DBF.

That's no longer the case, however. In the two videos we're going to discuss, Selwyn Rabins shows you how to build a stock charting application that uses a REST Web service call to Yahoo! Stocks to populate a high-low-close chart, without sending the data by way of a local database. Now, it's not that there's any dearth of Stock Charting applications in the world, but think about it: a high-low-close chart (or any other form of time-series chart) is also useful for other data that varies with time, be it daily factory production yield ranges or minute-by-minute patient blood pressure range readings in a hospital setting.

Selwyn starts this video by demonstrating the application, and then lifts the covers to show you how it was done. It is best viewed full-screen.

The key code discussed above is:

dim url as c = "http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?a="+month+"&b="+dayNumber+"&c="+year+"&s="+ticker

dim data as c = http_get_page2(url)

'data returned by yahoo is chr(10) delimited, not crlf delimited!

'data is returned with newest data on top. we want oldest data on top, so sort the data.

data = word(data,2,chr(10),999999)

data = strtran(data,",","|")

data = sortsubstr(data,chr(10),"A")

Basically, all we have to do is to construct the correct URI for the stock we want, get the page associated with that URI, and massage the data a little so that it is in the correct format for the chart.

In the second half of the video, Selwyn debugs through the call and lets you see the data, then shows you how the ticker name is retrieved from the drop-down and put into the chart to implement the dynamic title.

How cool is that?

You can download the component used for this application from here. Once you have it, copy it into an Alpha Five v11 web project and modify it to your heart's content.

ALPHA SOFTWARE DELIVERS SIGNIFICANT UPDATES TO ALPHA FIVE V11

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Heller) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:40:58 PDT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact:
Cathy Caplener
Be Cause PR
1-310-428-7476
cathy@becausepr.com

Alpha Software Contact:
Richard Rabins
Richard@AlphaSoftware.com

ALPHA SOFTWARE DELIVERS SIGNIFICANT UPDATES TO ALPHA FIVE V11

Developers can now integrate sophisticated charts, graphs, analytics, and dashboards

into data-driven business applications

BURLINGTON, Mass. - July 11, 2012 - Alpha Software, a leading innovator in development tools and platforms to create data-driven business web applications, today delivered a substantial update to its award-winning Alpha Five v11 development platform. Developers can now integrate a wide array of sophisticated charts, graphs and analytics into business applications quickly and easily. The comprehensive dashboards that can now easily be built into Alpha Five v11 applications empower managers to summarize critical data trends, improving management decisions and the bottom line.

Alpha Five v11 enables developers to create the many diverse web and mobile business applications that organizations require today, without blowing the budget. Developers can build these applications once and then run them on any PC, tablet or smartphone, which dramatically improves time-to-market and significantly reduces the costs of developing, deploying and maintaining the applications.

“Alpha Software’s top priority is to provide developers with a platform to build robust business applications with the web and mobile functionality that their users demand,” explains Richard Rabins, Co-Chairman and Co-CEO of Alpha Software. “Today’s update to Alpha Five v11 significantly increases developer productivity and also helps customers enhance their decision-making ability with charts and graphs, powerful analytics and comprehensive dashboards in their applications. With our latest update the developer is the champion who helps the company be more competitive and profitable.”

“The latest Alpha Five release contains industry-changing features that will increase developer productivity and creativity,” says Thomas Ritter, IT Director of the Newark Group, a leader in paperboard manufacturing for every industry with dozens of locations throughout the US, Canada, and Western Europe. “The new Chart Control feature solves a major requirement in building modern applications by enabling the developer to produce graphical dashboards from their data. The Documentation Viewer built directly into the development tool allows developers to access documentation regardless of whether they are connected to the Internet or not, which is a huge time saver. And as always, the beauty of Alpha Five is that a novice user can produce applications without any coding, and at the same time a more experienced user can get under the hood to write any custom code they want. At this point in time I see no limit to what can be done with Alpha Five.”

ABOUT THE CHART CONTROL
The new Alpha Five Chart Control allows developers to base any of ten types of charts on any of seven types of data series and display the charts in a dialog using customizable 2-D and 3-D styles. The charts, chart styles, and data series can easily be defined using graphical builders, and can be enhanced and animated through interfaces to JavaScript and Xbasic. Multiple charts can be displayed in a single dialog to create dashboards. A series of 20 tutorial videos located at http://ow.ly/caxo2 demonstrates how developers can use the charts and data series, and a single web page at http://ow.ly/caxsm demonstrates 100 different sample charts.

PRODUCT AVAILABILITY INFORMATION
In addition to the charting, graphing, analytical and dashboarding capabilities mentioned above, there are other significant enhancements that are included in this major update to Alpha Five v11. For all of the details, go to http://ow.ly/caxF2 .

ABOUT ALPHA SOFTWARE
Alpha Software empowers developers to quickly create and modify robust, data-driven business applications that run on any PC, Tablet, or Smartphone quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively. Its flagship and award-winning product, Alpha Five, is a rapid application development platform that enables developers to build and modify any business application once and run it anywhere. The product increases developer productivity with a shorter learning curve providing companies with a shorter time to market product cycle. Alpha Five is used by millions of user. Alpha Software, founded in 1982, is privately held and is based in Burlington, MA. For more information go to http://www.alphasoftware.com and http://blog.alphasoftware.com.

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Do we value our own data privacy?

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Heller) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 12:09:11 PDT

by Jeff Kalwerisky, Vice President and Director of Information Security and Technical Training, CPE Interactive

Data privacy! Stolen credit card numbers! Lost social security numbers! Protect your personal information! Beware of online fraudsters and scammers! Nigerian 419 get-rich-quick schemes!

The list goes on and the warnings are becoming ubiquitous. We’ve all heard about the lost or stolen laptop containing unencrypted payroll, human resources, or medical information on dozens, hundreds, even thousands of innocent people.

Yet it appears that that we don’t really value our own privacy. For most of us, this has become a case of information overload, resulting in a general attitude of “So what? Who could possibly be interested in my data?” A recent research report found that a majority of people will give up sensitive data, such as email addresses, cell phone numbers, even their email passwords (!), in return for small rewards like candy bars or something “free”. How often have you been offered a “free” report or Webinar, in return for which you must fill out a screed of “required” personal data – all irrelevant to the ostensible reward? Despite Websites’ protestations that “We will never sell or share your data”, once you provide this useful contact information, be sure that targeted ads will soon be coming to your email and phone.

You don't have to give up your information

The solution to these requests for your information is simple: don’t give it up so easily! If the phone number and address fields are “required”, just enter garbage. Remember that even a valid ZIP code may allow the marketing experts to track you down, so just type in any old ZIP code from any other state. [Ed: But don't enter garbage when the results matter to you: for example, don't enter a false email address if the vendor is going to use it to send you a download link, and don't make up a mailing address if it's legitimately needed for a shipment or to authenticate a credit card charge.]

And, of course, the amount of personal freely provided on social media sites like Facebook and Google+ is a treasure trove for criminals. Ominously, human resource departments have also climbed onto this particular bandwagon and are using social media data in making hiring and firing decisions. Some of them are even demanding that applicants provide their Facebook passwords, an egregious invasion of personal privacy.

Until now, the main threat to our privacy has seemed to be human stupidity (the lost laptop with unencrypted personal data), criminal activity (emails or Websites with malware designed to gain control of your computer), or our naïve offering up of our personal data.

Big Data is a big threat

A recent disturbing event shows than there is an even bigger threat to our privacy: so-called Big Data. Big Data is the term du jour for massive databases accumulated by virtually every large company. As predicted ominously in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, Big Brother is indeed watching us. But it turns out that Big B isn’t from the government; instead he resides in otherwise benign companies with which we may do business. The data analysts in companies from Google and Amazon to your local supermarket and pharmacy chains have started to figure out how to use their databases to identify sensitive information about us merely from our normal purchasing and browsing activities.

Targeted!

In an especially egregious example, recently Target – normally a trusted name – figured out how to identify which women customers were pregnant, without even talking to them. By computer crawling through masses of purchase data, they identified around 25 products that allowed each shopper to be assigned a “pregnancy prediction” score. They could also fairly closely estimate the woman’s due date and even the baby’s sex (e.g., blue booties)! This allowed Target generously to send the customer “targeted” coupons timed to specific stages of her pregnancy.

The story broke when an angry man complained to Target in Minnesota that his high-school age daughter was receiving coupons from Target for maternity clothing, nursery furniture, baby clothes, etc. It turned out that what the company knew but the father did not was correct. Still, this takes “customer service” to a new low.

And Big Brother now knows more about you and your family than you may know yourself.

Perhaps we should return to paying for retail purchases in good old-fashioned cash.

Innovation and manufacturing in America is alive and well

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 06:52:16 PDT

For the last decade or more there have been endless reports in the press about the decline of
manufacturing and innovation in America.

This has always bothered me since what brought me (and my brother Selwyn - who heads up the development team at Alpha) as a 22 year old student to Cambridge, MA and MIT in the first place was the the well deserved reputation of the USA for innovation, industriousness and manufacturing.

So with the July 4th holiday coming up, it was very gratifying to see this blog post by my friend, columnist and tech industry watcher David Strom http://strom.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/henry-ford/

The spirit of innovation, research and discovery that David Strom describes are certainly alive and well at Alpha as we continue on our quest to make Alpha Five the leading product for the rapid creation of business apps for the web and mobile devices.

Microsoft Access users no longer have to be frustrated that the path to the web is painful.

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 04:55:56 PDT

The movement from Windows desktop applications to web and browser applications for business started many years ago and has become an unstoppable trend which has only accelerated with the adoption of AJAX, which has allowed web applications to perform with desktop-like speed.

With the broad use of MS Office, Microsoft Access became very popular for building Windows desktop applications. The result of this is that today there exists a large number of companies who have Access applications for the desktop that they now need to move to the web as quickly and cost effectively as possible.

It turns out that Microsoft's solution for moving Access applications to the web requires either: A) publishing to Sharepoint and even then, there are serious limitations when it comes to reporting and the ability to work with applications that include vba code (which most serious applications include,) or B) using Visual Studio.Net which takes a lot of time and requires a lot of coding!

As a consequence of this, we have seen a very rapidly growing base of MS Access customers adopting Alpha Five v11 because of its ability to build powerful and secure web applications (with reporting, dashboards, mapping, multimedia, scheduling) very quickly compared to Visual Studio.Net and other development options.

See the outcome (in the chart below) of the survey we ran with Alpha Five v11 customers, where we asked about the productivity of Alpha Five v11 vs other tools they had used in the past for building web applications.

To assist Access customers making the move to Alpha Five v11 we have now created a white paper and provided more information on this page http://info.alphasoftware.com/bring-your-access-applications-to-web-and-mobile-devices

If you need any help in moving your Access application to Alpha Five - please email marketing@alphasoftware.com

Windows Desktop Applications with Alpha Five v11

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 09:42:17 PDT

Clearly we are living in an increasingly web/browser/mobile oriented world and Alpha Software, as most of you already know, is focusing a huge effort in this direction. However, some of you may not know that Alpha Five v11 is also able to build comprehensive data-driven applications for Windows as well.

To illustrate this, we would like to share an email we recently received from one of our customers.

I guess I’m an oddball for the Alpha Five community. I’m not a professional developer, I’m an attorney but have some significant programming skills going back decades – I can (rather could) actually program very effectively in C (plus Pascal, VB, COBOL and Fortran) in Unix and VAX environments.

I’m also a director of a small family business which provides finance services in the taxi industry. When I became involved in that business they were using Excel to manage installment payments and insurance premiums – a nightmare of repetitive and error prone data entry.

Thought about using Access to build something more productive and decided to look around online. Found Alpha Five, tried it, loved it bought it. The business now has a fully functional base application which creates credit quotes and agreements (in compliance with law), reads the daily payments received file from the bank and posts them to the customers, and links into the Sage financial package sales ledger. Overdue letters are generated automatically etc. Wealth of reports for cash management, capital utilization etc.

The “sister” application is a remote package used by insurance brokers to create “on site” credit quotations and agreements for their clients, detail of which are then emailed to the company for import into the application.

Nice position to be in.

Without these two linked applications the business could not grow – it has now grown too much too quickly! Our problem now is not whether we can cope with increased business … but as we are not a bank, how do we fund the huge amount of business we can now process and which we are being asked to underwrite. Nice position to be in.

Am also using it within my “day job” for a variety of bespoke applications associated with contract management and risk analysis.

What do I think of Alpha Five v11? Overall …. it’s brilliant.

Regards,
Matthew

Product update: Charts, Local Documentation, y mucho más

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Heller) — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 08:06:28 PDT

Today we released what may have been our biggest product update since the launch of Alpha Five Version 11 last October. It includes many new features with benefits for both Desktop and Web developers.

One of the highlights is a new local Documentation Viewer, which allows fast local access to the documentation even when your computer is not connected to the Internet, and the ability to update the local documentation from the master Wiki when it is connected to the Internet. When using the local viewer, you can filter titles using wildcards, search full text using wildcards, search full text with multiple conditions, and browse the table of contents.

This release includes three new Feature Packs: Proximity Search for the Grid Component, a Map Control for the Dialog Component, and Chart Controls for the Dialog Component.

All three are free to subscribers.

Grid Component - Proximity Search The Proximity Search Control allows you to easily add a search field to your Grid to find all records within a specified radius of an address (such as 70 Blanchard Rd, Burlington MA 01803) or a partial address (such as Burlington MA). This feature only works with SQL tables that have a Geography/Geometry field.

Dialog Component - Map Control You can now put map controls on a Dialog component. The map control object exposes methods that allows you to easily program against the map object. For example, you can center the map, add markers to the map, read the position of markers, etc. You could easily bring up a map control from the item selected from the results of a proximity search.

Currently the map control uses Google Maps. In the future, if there is sufficient demand, we would like to add support for other map vendors, such as Bing.

Dialog Component - Chart Control You can now add charts to the Dialog Component. This allows the easy creation of dashboards.

To see a list of all chart types that are offered, click here.

The basic principle behind defining a chart is as follows.

First define the data series on which the chart is based.
A chart can be be based on one or more data series
To define data series, select the Properties pane and then click the smart field for the 'Data series' property (see below for more details)
Once you have defined your data series, add a Chart control to the Dialog. You can add as many Chart controls to a Dialog as you want. This allows you to create 'dashboard' type applications.
To add a Chart control to the Dialog, select the 'Chart' control in the list of available 'Dialog Controls'.
After you have added the Chart control to the Dialog, click the 'Chart definition' smart field to define the properties of the chart.

This release includes 6 exciting new Subscriber Benefits -- time-saving features that are only available to subscribers. These are

Automatically geocode addresses in the data at the same time the record is saved into a SQL database
Compute a Geography Field from Latitude/Longitude Values
Define an action to display a message that automatically fades out of view over a certain interval. Fade-out messages are ideal for providing feedback to a user to indicate, for example, that some action has been completed.
Display a fade-out confirmation message to the user if the data was successfully saved when the user clicks the Submit button in a Dialog
Advanced Message Box: When you create an action to display a message box, instead of using the built-in Javascript alert() and confirm() functions, which are very primitive, and do not allow custom styling, you can now choose an advanced option which allows you to create a styled message box that uses the A5.messageBox() function in the Alpha Five Javascript library. Also, when you use the advanced option, you can define custom buttons to appear on the dialog, so you are not limited to OK, Cancel, Yes and No.
Defining Javascript using Javascript Actions instead of Writing Javascript Functions - When you define a Javascript function you need to write the Javascript code by hand. In the Dialog Properties pane, a new property 'Javascript Actions' has been added. This allows you to define Javascript using genies. Defining Javascript Actions is similar to defining Javascript Functions for your Dialog, except that you use the Action Javascript Builders to write the Javascript code rather than hand-coding it. The Actions that you define here can be called by various event handlers in your Dialog.

Last, but not least, this release includes many Bug Fixes. Despite our push to add new features, bugs that you report and we can reproduce are never neglected, always documented transparently, and often fixed within a day of the report.

Full details about this update are in the release notes.

A developers journey from Delphi to Servoy to Alpha Five v11

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 12:14:24 PDT

One of the reasons that Alpha Five v11 has built up an enthusiastic following is because we are committed to innovation in an industry that demands innovation.

For example, since the release of Alpha Five v11 about 9 months ago we have already shipped 11 powerful feature packs with 3 more coming within days. All these feature packs are all designed to boost developer productivity. (See below for details on the feature packs.)

The other reason behind the following that has built up around Alpha Five v11 is our focus on customers and making improvements based on real world suggestions that get fed back to us through our customer base.

As I have said before, the best part of my job is talking to customers who are having excellent results with Alpha Five v11 and who are constantly giving us suggestions for improving Alpha Five. A good example of this is a recent conversation with Frank Bevers who is a developer who works with customers in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Three new Feature Packs shipping soon for Alpha Five v11

The three are: Charting/Dashboards, Mapping for Dialogs and Proximity search

Feature Packs now shipping for Alpha Five v11

See videos about each feature pack in our video library.

Image Gallery Component

Easily Add a Powerful Image Gallery Component to your Desktop, Web, and Mobile Applications

The image gallery component is a beautiful, and intuitive interface for displaying pictures in desktop, web and mobile applications. On mobile applications, orientation changes can be detected (and adjusted for) and touch events are supported. The component is smart enough to detect the capabilities of each device, and depreciate features when needed.

See the videos

Video Player Component

Add a Flexible HTML5 and YouTube® Video Player to your Desktop, Web, and Mobile Applications.

This video player makes it a snap to embed HTML5 and YouTube Videos into any kind of application. Video has become an important part of many new applications in virtually every industry, including education, insurance, and the medical field. With the new video component, you can display videos within your applications. And your videos can be hosted from virtually anywhere, including YouTube

See the videos

Google® Map Component

Add Powerful Graphical Information System (GIS) Features to Desktop, Web and Mobile Apps

Alpha Five v11 does the "heavy lifting" for you when it comes to mapping, geography, and graphical information systems. The new Google Map component allows your desktop, web, and mobile applications to link to Google Map web services. You can perform geographic searches, display points on a map, and much more. This makes it easy, for example, to add a store locator to your application, so that people can find the nearest points of interest based on their current location.

See the videos

Calendar Component

Add powerful drag-and-drop scheduling to your desktop, web, and mobile applications.

If scheduling is important in your application, the new calendar component is ideal. It provides an intuitive way to work with events and dates and uses an intuitive calendar interface. (This feature pack also requires the use of a 3rd party component, which is sold separately. For pricing and to order this additional component, pleaseclick here to connect to the Web2Cal! website.)

See the videos

Embedded Calendar Control for Dialog Components

Easily Add a Powerful Calender Control to your Web Dialog Components

This feature pack adds a powerful calendar control to your Version 11 Web dialog components. The calendar can be used as a date picker (as well as a starting and ending date picker) and it can also be used to display events in a easily modifiable calendar UI. You have direct access to a nice selection of both server side and client side events to create sophisticated functionality. (This feature pack does NOT require a 3rd party component to run. It includes everything you need.)

See the videos

Slider Control for Dialog Components

Add Powerful Slider Controls to your Web Dialog Components

This feature pack adds a powerful slider control to your Version 11 web dialog components. Use the slider to set filter ranges and more. Gives your apps cutting edge functionality and form.

See the videos

Search and Navigation for Dialog Components

Easily Add Navigation Tools

This powerful feature pack has two main benefits. First in your data-bound Alpha Five v11 dialog components - you can now easily add a search part. It also adds a powerful way to navigate through your records by using Next/Buttons, or a Slider Control, or via Picking Records from a list, or any combination of the three.

See the videos

Power Search for Grids in Dialog Components

Find and Filter Records in Embedded Grids

The feature pack allows you to create a Power Search module to find and filter records in a grid that has been embedded into your Version 11 dialog components.

See the videos

Live Linked Embedded Grids for Dialog Components

Easily Link Embedded Grid Fields

Linking is like searching, in that it causes the records in the target Grid to be filtered, but has a very important difference - the link fields in the target Grid are automatically set to their corresponding value in the parent component. So, for example, if the embedded Grid is linked on (say) the 'invoice_number' field, all new records that are added to the embedded Grid will automatically have their 'invoice_number' field set to the linking value.

See the videos

Advanced Tabbed Object for Dialog Components

Expose new methods for selecting the Active Pane

The standard Tab control object in the Dialog allows you to group Dialog controls into a series of 'panes'. When the Dialog is run, the user clicks on a tab button to show the corresponding tab pane. However, clicking on a tab button is not the only way in which you might want to change the active pane. With this Feature Pack other methods for selecting the active pane are exposed.

The various ways in which the active tab pane can be selected are:

User clicks a tab button
Programmatic - some Javascript code is executed
Automatic - a client-side 'watch' expression determines which tab pane is active
Timer - a timer automatically cycles between the tab panes

You can also use the timer feature to automatically cycle through a series of images.

See the videos

Power Search for Embedded Reports in Dialog Components

Use the Dialog Component to create a 'Search Part'

With this feature pack, the Dialog Component can be used to create a 'Search Part' for a Report so that the end-user can enter search criteria to define exactly which records to display in the report.

See the videos

Doing Alpha Five Development in Groups

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:44:48 PDT

Periodically, we hear some variation of "Can I work on an Alpha Five project in a group?" The answer is an emphatic "Yes!" To begin with, much of Alpha Five is developed in Alpha Five, and our developers collaborate using a version control system.

Below I've quoted a wiki entry describing the v11 feature that gives all developers the ability to save code in plain text files in the file system, instead of saving code in binary database records.

Working with Version Control

In Alpha Five Version 11 we have made it easy to integrate your Alpha Five coding with external version control systems.

Most version control systems depend on storing the small differences between successive versions of text files for efficient storage. Most Alpha Five artifacts are normally stored in a binary database or a binary file for efficient loading and saving. This has historically presented an "impedance mismatch" between Alpha Five code and version control systems. To address this, we have introduced the option to keep a project's code in an external file system.

Using an external file system dictionary

To convert a code library to an external file system dictionary, give the focus to the Code tab of the Control Panel and select the Code|Convert Library to filesystem dictionary... menu item.

The next dialog to appear will ask you for the target folder and the passwords of any protected scripts and functions.

Press OK and your current library database will be backed up and a new folder will be created containing your code files.

Under the new directory will be two subdirectories containing your resources and scripts, respectively.

You can now commit your files, which are simple text, to source code control.

When you want to ship or publish an Alpha Five application, you can non-destructively convert your file system dictionary back to a library database.

If your functions are contained in an AEX file, it is not necessary to convert the file system dictionary back to a library database.

Add Dashboards and Analytics to your Alpha Five v11 Applications

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 07:38:38 PDT

Since the release of Alpha Five v11 we have had the ability to add charts to applications. With the next update of Alpha Five v11 charting has now been woven tightly into the development tool as a control type in the dialog builder.

The great thing about charting, dashboarding and analytics is that they are visual, so it

makes sense to show you what is now possible to achieve rapidly with Alpha Five v11 web and mobile web applications rather than describe it.
For more information please click here.
To see a full list of chart types check out this link please.

Just two of the multiple chart types made possible by the new Charting feature pack for Alpha Five V11

I would also encourage you to spend some time going through the comprehensive set of videos for this feature pack. I think you will find that the feature list is very rich and comprehensive and adds significantly to the power of Alpha Five v11.

A Developer's Journey from Visual FoxPro to Alpha Five v11, after evaluating IronSpeed, Iceberg, FileMaker, and Servoy

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 12:15:29 PDT

We are always interested in talking to our customers and understanding the journey they have taken to get to Alpha Five v11.

We have talked a fair amount about Access developers who are adopting Alpha Five v11 because of its power and productivity for building data-driven web and mobile business applications. There are also other groups of developers who are adopting Alpha Five v11 for similar reasons. One of these groups is professional Visual FoxPro developers, and I would like to share (with his permission) a message we received recently from Jaime Ben David, a professional developer in Israel, who outlined his journey in the email below.

Hi Richard:

I first checked IronSpeed by downloading their Express version. In this version you just have one or two available templates. I tried to build a basic data entry form (i.e., similar to a grid with a detail view), which i achieved, but not as easily as building a grid with a detail view in Alpha Five v11. The resulting form was OK, but a little bit too cluttered in my opinion, and trying to manually modify it was not obvious. I understand this may be doable through .NET editing, but one thing I didn't want to have to do was to learn nor use .NET. I then played a bit more with their available options, but all along I had the same feeling of being caged in their rigid templates and display methods, so after one or two days I decided to abandon IronSpeed.

Iceberg is similar to IronSpeed; a little bit easier and also easier to modify, but still too complex to build anything that is slightly different from a basic grid/detail view scenario. I even had an online session with the developer of the tool, a nice guy from Ireland, but after going through all the sessions where he demonstrated his stuff, I realized that there would be a steep learning curve that also involves .net, and the price is even higher than IronSpeed.

FileMaker is a joke. [ed: Jaime's own opinion. Israelis can be harsh.] They don't have any suitable Web development in place, and even their desktop developing platform, is as we say in Israel, is not ay ay ay. [ed: roughly, "not fantastic", or "didn't blow me away"]

Servoy is the only serious development platform I considered at the time. They have a solid platform and are supported by Ken Levy, whom I know personally. He is a genius who at some point was the Visual Foxpro product manager at Microsoft. He evangelizes for Servoy now. They have a good community, and the company issues new versions in a timely manner. Nevertheless, I followed many discussions of fellow Visual Foxpro developers who made the switch and I soon realized that there would be a steep learning curve as well. Also, the tool is very expensive.

As for Alpha Five v11, I really liked the ease-of-use, the intuitive way in which a complete newbie like me could create an impressive grid/detail view or even a grid/dialog. Every basic feature I tested just worked, and every advertised feature just delivered. I noticed I could modify the basic templates with Xbasic, which didn't scare me at all -- I see Xbasic as being very similar to the Visual FoxPro language. I am learning HTML and JavaScript, but with the solid foundation I found in Alpha Five v11, I am not scared to try, so now I am "learning while walking" [ed: roughly, "training on the job"] with great success.

I bought Alpha Five version 10 developer version over a year back, but didn't make use of the tool until after testing all the other tools as described above. Then I bought my subscription right with v11, and when I went through the videos and trainings that come with the subscription, I realized I had enough material and knowledge to start creating applications with Alpha Five V11.

Finally, prior to committing to Alpha Five, I read a lot about how quickly bugs were fixed and about the pace at which new features were implemented, Overall, I have been overwhelmingly impressed by Alpha Five v11.

Warm regards,

Jaime

New web contact manager template, explained

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Heller) — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 10:31:02 PDT

Those of you who have been actively working with Alpha Five v11 may have noticed that the New Project Dialog includes a new option to create project from a template. One system template has been provided, a web Contact Manager.

The web contact manager template is documented with help, but in addition two videos explain the process of using it. The first video shows you how to create an application from a project template:

The second video shows you all the options you can set in the web contact manager template, and how to use the web contact manager after you've created a copy with sample data included:

Using this template, you can either create a pre-populated contact manager for test purposes or an unpopulated contact manager for your personal or company use. You many create as many contact managers as you want from this template, and customize individual instances as needed.

Using the web contact manager template is one way to go from newbie to success with Alpha Five web applications in a few minutes. If you're just starting to work with Alpha Five, a contact manager built from this template and populated with your company's employees might be a great way to show your boss the power of Alpha Five web applications.

The template creates Access MDB files and uses SQL queries. It is very simple to migrate these files to SQL Server or another industrial-strength SQL database, change the connection string in your production publication target, and wind up with a web contact manager that can easily support your whole department or even your whole company.

You can also enhance your contact manager with additional features and customize its look and feel, since it is built with standard Alpha Five components and styles. If there are features that you'd like to see built into the web contact manager template or additional templates that you'd find useful, let us know: we're always ready to listen to our customers.

Increased Mobile Web Security is the Focus of a New Strategic Relationship Between Alpha Software, Inc. and CPE Interactive, Inc

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 10:48:16 PDT

As we announced this morning, we have formed a strategic relationship with CPE Interactive, Inc., a security training company, focused on mobile web security, in order to help our customers reduce the risk that sensitive business information will be compromised if and when mobile devices are lost or stolen.

Contact me by email at richard@alphasoftware.com, by Skype at richard-rabins, and by phone at +1 (617) 838-4488 if you'd like to discuss security training related to Alpha Five-based mobile web applications.

Full information is contained in the press release on PRNewswire.

Mary Meeker's "eye-popping" annual trends re internet and mobile trends and re-imagination hits the web.

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 05:17:51 PDT

As many of you know, Alpha has spent many years and many millions of dollars investing in building a poweful and highly productive platform for the rapid creation of web and mobile applications.

Why are we so fixated on this mission?

Quite simply, the answer is that this is what our customers are asking for. Namely a great development platform that will let them build the next generation of web and mobile applications in the shortest amount of time and in the most cost effective way.

So it came as no surprise to read reports of the presentation given recently by Mary Meeker (the high profile analyst) at the Wall Street Journal's "All Things Digital Conference" that helped validate our decision to focus on this mission which will help ensure that our customers are extremely well positioned for the future which is taking place now!

The full story about Mary's presentation is shown here

and Mary's presentation is shown here .

Double Clicks on a hyperlink with an AJAX callback don't have to result in a double callback in Alpha Five v11

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 20:26:26 PDT

A vexing problem can occur in building AJAX applications when a user double clicks (vs single clicks) on a hyperlink associated with an AJAX call.

In Alpha Five v11 this problem can be averted. Click the link here to see how.

Si, Oui, Jawohl, Ja - Yes indeed Alpha Five v11 can produce reports in multiple languages

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 10:49:01 PDT

As we talked about in the previous blog, Alpha Five v11 is being used all over the world.

These two videos below show how you can work with reports in multiple languages in an applicaiton.

Alpha Five v11 Reports in multiple languages - YouTube
4 min

Alpha Five v11 Reports in multiple languages table Part 2
3 min

Alpha Five V11 is making developers more productive in ALL parts of the globe.

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 09:47:34 PDT

Alpha Five v11 is used all over the world. Approximately 60% of our customers are in the USA and the remaining customers are in parts of world such as the UK, Australia, Holland, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Greece, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand, India, Hungary, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa and the Middle East.

One of the most gratifying things for us is when we get emails from customers in developing nations who tell us how Alpha Five v11 is making a material and important difference in their professional lives.

As an example of this, I wanted to share a short email from Muhammad Sultan Al Mamun who is an IT consultant in Bangledesh.

Dear Mr Selwyn Rabins.

We are migrating to your product. It would have been so much better for us

(because of the time we would have saved) if we had found your product five years ago!

Many thanks to you and your company's jewels (your programmers) for creating Alpha Five v11.

In the future our ability to be more productive in our work in Bangladesh will be greatly

enhanced because of Alpha Five V11.

Filemaker Application gets moved to the Web rapidly with Alpha Five v11

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 09:29:53 PDT

I recently received this email from a new convert to the world of Alpha Five development by the name of Dion McCormick from www.gkrsolutions.com

Dion is a very talented and successful developer who has been building database applications for many years, but like many readers of this blog, was getting frustrated by the amount of time taken to build robust, secure and scalable business apps for the web until he discovered Alpha Five. Here is the email from Dion.

I was having lunch with an associate of mine who told me about a client of his who had an interesting business challenge. This company had identified an untapped market that could be serviced by them IF they had the right technology delivery system.

The background is that they had developed an in house solution using FileMaker. This solution was being used by about four employees and worked well for their purposes. But when they identified the business opportunity which involved providing the data and services they had developed internally to a larger audience in the outside world, they ran into a serious road block.

Specifically, there was no way they could take the in house FileMaker solution and provide it to a wider (and more diverse) audience on a cost basis that would make the business case work. They looked at the newer releases of the Filemaker but they just couldn't get the functionality that they wanted and numbers (costs) simply would not work out.

They also had another issue, they knew that the target user would need a native web experience. The user experience that they had with the FileMaker worked fine for the highly trained internal staff, but it would be a nightmare to try and ramp up with a lot of "casual" users. They also felt that the external users wanted to have a more native experience with the system.

The last key item….speed. In the different tests they did with their current solution, they just couldn't deliver a speedy user experience over the web. It just came across as clunky and frustrating.

They looked at a number of different ways and technologies to deliver the solution. They received a bunch of bids, but the costs remained too high. Not only were they finding the development to be very expensive, they also found that the time frame to create the solution was just way too long.

I knew I had a potential solution to their problem. Alpha Five v11. Not only did the Alpha Five platform have all of the necessary components to create the web user experience they were looking for, but it also had the upcoming mobile components that would open up a whole new avenue for delivering their solution to mobile users.

It took about one week to create the first prototype that duplicated the key features from the in-house system and another week to polish it and add some key elements they desired for the end user.

They were blown away with what I did in Alpha Five v11.

They didn't realize how much functionality could be delivered in such a short time and on a web platform that was immediately scalable. (MySQL and Alpha Five Application Server). All of the estimates they were getting were going to take months to deliver even the most basic of functionality they were desiring.

The system is now in beta testing with a select group of users that are providing feedback on the user experience. This information is being used to drive new features and capabilities into the solution. One huge benefit is that because it is a cloud based application, we are able to do quicker and smaller releases on an ongoing basis so the users can see their ideas in action.

The customer is very excited about seeing the application migrated to the web and multiple mobile platforms They love the fact that they won't have to hire developers for each platform to deploy the solution and that the core logic/functionality won't have to be touched when the mobile platforms are deployed.

Click here for a video of a couple of the features of the prototype system.

Workspace application types

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Heller) — Wed, 30 May 2012 10:36:27 PDT

On the Alpha Software message board, we have long segregated questions about Web development into different forums than questions about desktop development, primarily to avoid confusion. Now that we're hearing from many of our customers that they only do Web development and rarely use Alpha Five's desktop functionality, we've made it easy to simplify your user interface in the Alpha Five development environment.

This feature is currently in prerelease builds.

When opening Alpha Five, you will see a new dialog asking you what kind of applications you plan to build. Note that you can change this selection at any time.

If you check both boxes, you'll see all options, just as you used to:

If you check only the Web box, we won't show you the desktop-only sample Workpaces:

We hope this makes your development life easier.

Alpha Five v11 vs. design software like Dreamweaver

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Wed, 30 May 2012 14:02:33 PDT

I recently came across a question that had been sent to Brett Johnston our head of sales and service in which the customer was trying to understand understand under which circumstances he might use Alpha Five v11 instead of Dreamweaver. I thought it was a common enough question that justified providing Brett's reply in a blog post. So here goes..

Reply to Prospective Alpha Five customer

Thanks for the e-mail.

You don't actually have to choose. You can still incorporate what you create in

Dreamweaver into your Alpha Application. (Obviously Dreamweaver is not a data

driven application development tool, so you do not have that functionality in it.)

Take a look at these articles + videos and also check out the very cool new

CSS3 style builder in Alpha five Version 11.

Also check out:

Regards

Brett Johnston

Alpha Software, Inc.

brett@alphasoftware.com

Portable Career and Alpha Five. What is the Link?

noreply@blogger.com (Richard Rabins) — Mon, 28 May 2012 06:29:52 PDT

"Portable career" is a term that I first saw when reading a blog post http://strom.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/portable-career/ from a person, that I have known and respected for many years, who has been following the computer industry by the name of David Strom.

In his post, David points out that as a writer and analyst he is able to simply unplug his computer and move, to accommodate family needs, and he can continue operating from pretty much anywhere in the world that has good connectivity.

This blog post got me thinking that anyone who has built proficiency in building applications in Alpha Five has also created a portable career for themselves.

It really does not matter where in the world they are based, because of the web and collaboration tools that exist, they can continue working without skipping a beat. If you are one of these folks then I would congratulate you for having the vision to choose such a "portable career."

The more I thought about this, the more I realized how true this is in the Alpha Five developer community. I can think of at least at least five Alpha Five developers (that I personally happen to know) who have moved in the last few months, to accommodate a career opportunity for their spouse or to be closer to family, and they have all indicated that their clients could not care less where they are located, because all they cared about was being able to continue to work them.

Alpha Five Workspaces

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Heller) — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:30:05 PDT

Historically, Alpha Five master projects were called "databases," because historically, Alpha Five was oriented around Dbase-compatible DBF databases. It has been a long time coming, but we've finally changed the terminology, mostly to help new users feel more at home in the IDE.

Alpha Five now has Workspaces, giving it terminology that is consistent with many modern development environments. It's a small change, but you'll see it throughout the product.

If you are really attached to the old terminology, you can change it back in your copy.

We'll try and update the documentation to reflect this change as soon as possible.

Of Moose and Llamas

noreply@blogger.com (Martin Heller) — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:53:06 PDT

In the next week or so, look for an enhanced schedule of Alpha Software blog posts, featuring tutorials and tips that will help you use our products, case studies and videos about successful Alpha developers, and some less serious stuff. If you have suggestions for blog postings that you'd like to see, email them to me or Richard (pattern: firstname + "@alphasoftware.com").

Meanwhile, some less serious stuff: