Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

[Racho]

Hi,

I've just downloaded the 30 day trial of Alpha 5 Platinum vers 9 and my situation is as follows

Our firm (50 users turnover 20 million sterling) has been using a programmable (Visual Basic like in the last few versions) RAD RDBMS since 1984.

Good as it is the current software is getting long in the tooth and is now unsupported as the software house went bust earlier this year. So I am forced to look at alternatives.

I am looking at a RAD RDBMS with modern form controls to include tab forms, grid views, sub forms and tree views etc. Preferably with native (or would accept ODBC) access to a SQL Server back end.

In the last few weeks I've trialled:
� FileMaker
Very pretty and easy RAD but too slow and proprietary and scripting language appears to be somewhat limiting once we go beyond the ordinary. Reads SQL - but slowly. Web support - but proprietary
� Access
Also very pretty with Office 2007 ribbon bars etc, and a great RAD. Faster than FileMaker and does read SQL but native file system is ACCDB and not SQL. Unfortunately uses VBA for coding and not .NET and in other respects there may be issues with under the bonnet functionality (for those 5-10% of the time when you need to do something different from the ordinary). Web publishing is nigh on at the �retard� level, which is a big disappointment
� Alpha 5
This now at Version 9 with maybe vers 10 in beta?.

Looking at A5's spec sheet this appears to have it all. XBasic � which will look quite familiar to what our ICT team of 4 are already using. Tools galore and to a low level (though not matching Visual Studio), hooks up to all sorts of stuff including QBooks (with suitable ODBC Drivers?)�.

Obviously it is early days in the shoot out between Access(been looking at for 2 weeks and A5 (only started to look at last week) and I have some more research to do yet. But some of the comparative reports I've seen or checked out myself are favourable such as on speed, web publishing (stated to be even better than IronSpeed which I demoed a few days ago � and all the better for being in the one package).

So what's the catch? Why am I asking to impose on member's time for some help?

In firing up A5 (and this maybe my machine and then again maybe not as Filemaker and Access trials have not reacted in the same way), as I test out various things I am getting the odd crash.

Now my team and I can live with such an occasional glitch if our output to our 'customers' (all our developement is in house but I treat our users as customers to keep quality standards as good as we can achieve) is rock solid, but in reviewing some of the posts on this forum I am getting the feeling that this may be an issue.

So in looking at Alpha 5,
- the specs look good (would miss out if no drag and drop however in a tree list for example),
- the videos are slick,
- the documentation and help are fine,
- the reviews look ok,
- the endorsements and the long and distinguished client base reassure

but we've had one product give us 25+ years good service and would dearly love to be sure that the next product we start to use is an equally good investment in our time and resources.

Looking forward to hearing your views...

[rmcgaffic]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

Richard,

I certainly do not consider myself an experienced Alpha Five, despite the fact that I have been using the package for over a year.

I am impressed with the depth of its functionality, but if you are coming from Visual Studio, you need to know what you can not presently do in Alpha Five. These are taken for granted by most Access/Visual Studio developers.

1. Lack of support for activeX controls. The reason why I have made such little progress in a year (hobby programmer) is that Alpha does not make it easy to use commercial activeX controls. It has not shown any willingness to publish a list of know compatible controls, so you will simply have to experiment. You may get lucky, but you may not, in which case you are screwed because I have not found one third party control house (.com or .net) that supports, or has even heard of, Alpha Five.

2. No drag and drop. Big problem if your application includes tasks and calendars, moving a task to a date on the calendar, etc. No ability to prioritize a task list by dragging and dropping task records so they are in the desired order. No ability to reorganize organizational chart records to display key players in a customer organization, etc.

3. No ability to display independent tables on the same form -- no dashboards, etc.

4. Browse is probably their best control. Rich and deep functionality. I think its their crown jewel control. Has most of the capability of a good third party ActiveX grid control.

5. No ability to place a splitter bar control on a desktop form. It can be done but completely writing a form in XDialog code, but if you're not up to the task and are a visual designer (as I am) this is a big shortcoming. I have not found a third party splitter control that is compatible with Alpha Five.

6. Tab control is adequate, but missing modern looking tabs. Alpha Five itself uses three different tab controls in its product, but you are limited to the basic rounded and square shapes.

7. This is not a shortcoming of Alpha per se, but the availability of add-ins is limited. This might be a good thing if the functionality was native, but it is not. File maker can offer these capabilities but using third party add-ins, such as those offered by seedcode.com. This is how Filemaker gets its drag and drop hierarchies and calendar functionality.

All of the above are wish list items for Alpha Five, that are currently availabe with Access. All of these features are required, in my mind, for a robust RAD desktop tool. Others can comment on its web capabilities. I also recognize that many applications do not require the above functionality, in which case it may be a perfect fit for your needs.

Coming from Access two years ago, I also looked at Filemaker whose scripting I found primitive compared to what Alpha offers. Filemaker does not allow the use ActiveX controls at all.

Bob McGaffic
Pittsburgh

[DaveM]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

Hi,

If I might chime in just a bit. Been using since about 1989???

I have used VB and almost everything you have referred to.

Alpha is a RAD tool. I never considered VB as a RAD tool. What you can do with Alpha in a few weeks could take months with VB.

Almost any situation you need to overcome can be overcome and probably already has by someone on this forum. The greatest strengths we all have and our secret weapon is this forum.

If you have see a crash problem and you are seeing it here, that is a good thing because it has or will be remedied quick. I have over 200 installs with paying and non paying customers and have no crash issues that can be put on Alpha. Customer or I may have caused a problem, but not Alpha.

Use Alpha with complete confidence and be sure to join and stay close to this forum.

[Racho]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

Thanks Bob,

The points you make are very helpful.

However what are your thoughts on reliability?

Regarding drag and drop functionality - we do need this - but perhaps it's not a deal breaker right now, let me explain a bit more...

My first priority is to get our data over from the existing database into SQL Server, with 300+ tables and a desire to take this opportunity to redesign it all anyway this will take 3-6 months at least.

We have been using Visual Studio (playing more like) with the additional tools from Dev Express, which can clearly give us (long term) all the functionality we could wish for. However the fly in the ointment with these is that all 4 of us recognise that we have a huge learning curve and that business needs require that we are productive with producing initial forms and systems our 'clients' can begin to use in anger (with good support) within 6-12 months with the timeline for a complete change over from the legacy db to the new one within 2-3 years.

The spec of A5 is what attracted us so much as we felt that we could do RAD and obtain good working results on the majority of our forms within a relatively short time frame, with a shallow learning curve as in design, paradigm and language there are a number of similiarities with what we use now. The lack of the sophisticated stuff like drag and drop can wait or can be coded in VB.NET where and if required.

Perhaps anyway some of these shortcomings may be addressed in future versions of A5 as I understand (from other posts read on this forum) that A5 are regularly issuing new versions, and therefore as we won't be doing anything really serious for 3-6 months (while the SQL back end is being built) we can afford to take a longer term view on these aspects that you draw my attention to.

So to condense this into 2 short questions:

1. Reliability - are my 'clients' going to be seeing crashes?
2. Are modern gui elements such as drag and drop in the tree view reasonably high on A5's priority list?

[Racho]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your post

These replies are also a positive in the products favour, as the depressing thing on the legacy systems we use is how we feel pretty isolated these days with few posts and even fewer replies as the user base drifts away.

Your post actually came in as I was hitting the send button on my reply, so as you can see I am 100% with you on how you perceive that VB and all the other 'goodies' provided by Ms and Co are all very nice but will hold us (and therefore the business) back from leveraging our database properly.

Good to hear that you might be getting the odd problem with your code (as do we all) but that once your stuff is tested and released the Clients are getting something solid.

Does everyone else (prepared to read and respond) out there echo that?

[Davidk]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

I've used Access since it's first version and decided to go looking for another development environment when MS wouldn't release their runtime with corrections until many months after bugs were fixed in the development system. I've written in VB but find the use of 3rd party controls leads to so many different problems because everyone implements differently. With VB you have to use 3rd party stuff because the tools just are there in VB. I used report writers, grids, image tools, and number and date tools in VB. It didn't take much more time than Access to develope in, other than learning all the tools.

I also looked at Filemaker but it's just not strong enough. A5 seemed, and almost still seems, the way to go. However, there are are few issues I've run into lately, and they seem a bit silly, but there you go. There is no way to control the depth of a dropdown combo box. There are a couple of different combo boxes to choose from, but the record-list combo box allows the user to see 7 records. I'm going to get huge complaints from my users over this one. I know... seems silly, but it's a UI thing.

If you're going to use Referential Integrity there is a 512 record limit on the number of children a parent can have. Once the parent is opened, the children will get locked and you can't have more than 512 locks.

Support for Activex controls exists... you can use them, but you have to dig a bit. There's a great OLE Automation Browser in A5 that exposes all the properties, methods, and events... that's helps enormously. I've used 2 image controls successfully but it's no walk in the park.... still it works... but may not work for all controls.

The Image Reference Field type in A5 is the only way to get record by record images to print in the A5 report writer. You can use another contorl (I would prefer ImagXpress) but the OnRecord event does not fire for the control.. or something like that... can't get it to work.

The Image Reference Field is incredibly slow. Once put into a table, just browsing the table is mind-numbingly slow. Read and writing to the field with code is great. The Image Reference Field carries only the path and name of the image, it doesn't store the image itself, but it does display the image - that's where the problem is... it's just too slow to use for display purporses. I only use it to get the image name and I'm forced to use it for reports. Displaying a report with this field is 3 times, or more, slower than ImagXpress.

There's a great Action scripting tool in A5, similar to Access macros, but better I think. Very powerful for getting basic stuff done.

Reponse to bugs is great... once a bug is reported you can expect a fix within a very short period of time. MS lost me on this one. I couldn't give my clients an needed update for months because they wouldn't release a current run-time... I think it took them over six months to catch up.

So far, I'm enjoying learning a new environment... slow going at times but it's a new system for me.

You're going to have to take a piece of your current system and write it in A5 and Access to find the best system. That's the only way you'll get a feel for what's going to work and, more importantly, what's not. Until you do that, you won't see the full picture of either dbms. I think Access and A5 are the only ones out there powerful enough to get a good job done.

[rmcgaffic]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

Richard,

You mentioned using Dev Express. They offer some pretty fantastic scheduling ActiveX controls, but note that their web page now features just their .net products.

If you ever get any Dev Express ActiveX controls to work with Alpha Five, please share/document your results with this forum.

Bob McGaffic
Pittsburgh, PA

[Davidk]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

I should have mentioned that this board... the people here... are an amazing asset to A5. So willing to help, code examples, make suggestions and a great collection of ideas to browse through.

[steve745]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

When I started with alpha5v9 i didn't know how a database worked now I have created 3 great functioning databases with the help of this forum and the people that serve it' I don't have any VB knowledge nor do I need to using alpha. If there is a way to do it Alpha has or will have a way soon to do almost anything.

[Riverguy]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

I was in your shoes a few weeks ago. I have not coded for many years and I suppose I am just a hobbyist too but this is cool. It's stable, has all kinds of functionality and I have been totally impressed. The manuals are going to be important so get as much documentation as you can on it.

The board is pretty responsive to say the least.

Cheers.

[jaryder]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

David,

If you're going to use Referential Integrity there is a 512 record limit on the number of children a parent can have. Once the parent is opened, the children will get locked and you can't have more than 512 locks.

Richard mentioned using SQL and when using active links you can not used Alpha's Referential Integrity option when setting up sets. I am sure that most SQL servers offer Referential Integrity and you would want that to be incorporated in the server anyway for speed reasons. For MySql the InnoDB engine supports both Referential Integrity and Transaction Rollback. You establish Referential Integrity in SQL with Foreign keys.

[Racho]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

Hi Scott,

I was in your shoes a few weeks ago. I have not coded for many years and I suppose I am just a hobbyist too but this is cool. It's stable, has all kinds of functionality and I have been totally impressed. The manuals are going to be important so get as much documentation as you can on it.

Thanks for your post

In actual fact this is how I started in the mid eighties and I suppose at that time you could call me a hobbyist and I identify somewhat with that moniker even now. Unfortunately the business has grown from 3 people to 50+ and the decisions I take now have to be very carefully considered.

I am a little worried that my requests about how stable the product is have not given rise to universal ringing endorsements. Looking at the web site I can see a whole host of very serious and large companies listed as users of the product, and this plus all the other things already mentioned (and on this thread) has given me a lot of hope that A5 may be what we need.

While this thread has thrown up some favourable comments on stability but not to the extent that I had hoped and I've also (for obvious reasons) received some PM's that don't exactly slate the product but that do give me cause to continue to check things out very carefully.

I would love now to receive posts from people that tell me I'm wrong or that over my implementation time scale of 12-24 months bugs and common wishlists are being steadily and satisfactorily eradicated.

Don't get me wrong I'm skirting close to offending people here, and this is not my intention, and with the prices being offered there will be some who might be asking what do you expect for the money? - and maybe they'd be right. I guess luckily or otherwise we got a good product for 25 years and want to continue the streak.

Thanks to all for your contributions

[Racho]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

I also looked at Filemaker but it's just not strong enough. A5 seemed, and almost still seems, the way to go. However, there are are few issues I've run into lately, and they seem a bit silly, but there you go. There is no way to control the depth of a dropdown combo box. There are a couple of different combo boxes to choose from, but the record-list combo box allows the user to see 7 records. I'm going to get huge complaints from my users over this one. I know... seems silly, but it's a UI thing.


I should have mentioned that this board... the people here... are an amazing asset to A5. So willing to help, code examples, make suggestions and a great collection of ideas to browse through.

Hi David,

Thanks for both your posts and especially the first one where you've written about some of the issues you've come across.

Regarding your second post describing how great this forum is, yes I can see that and have already commented on how impressed I am by this and other things like the tutorial videos etc.

A couple of questions,

How long have you been using A5 now, and in terms of knocking together a useable standalone for your users are you satisfied that in spite of some of the limitations you may be encountering that your are (or will be in reasonably short order) able to give them a rock solid environment with sufficient 'modern looking' GUI whistles and bells and speed of read/write access to the back end and which (as in my situation) will have the ability to scale to 50+ users without significant degradation?

[Davidk]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

I wouldn't consider the cost of the product... not when you're going to spend an incalculable amount of time developing. However, how much will it cost you to implement the run-time over 50 users? I can't speak to 50+ users banging away at an app in A5... others here can. It's a tough thing to test unless you invest in development and run-time systems and then build a test app and deploy it.

I've been re-writing a VB app over the last few months... but not spending a huge amount of time doing it.... just here and there. I can't make changes to the VB app any longer and so I need to re-do it. Would have been easy in Access but MS messes up systems with their run-time so that's out.

Most of that time was spent trying to figure out a couple of Activex controls... that takes time. The GUI feel and look is fine... I'm happy with it.

As for the back end I hope others can chime in about deploying in dbf and then re-deploying in SQL - what changes were required, if any. Also, have you looked at the Shadow capabilities?

[chematercero]

Re: Is Alpha 5 what I'm looking for?

If you're going to use Referential Integrity there is a 512 record limit on the number of children a parent can have. Once the parent is opened, the children will get locked and you can't have more than 512 locks.

Hi,

You mean this when using .dbf tables or using SQL engines.

This limitations sounds weird. Is there anyway to overcom it?

Regards,