Programmers Heaven http://www.programmersheaven.com
is a site that is well known for programming tools. It promotes itself as follows "This site is dedicated to programmers all over the world. Our main goal is to provide a complete start-off for programming related web surfing and file downloading." On occasion they decide to run reviews of products that they think are interesting or important in some way. So we were very happy to see that they decided to review Alpha Five Version 8. The full review is linked below and their conclusion was:
Final Thoughts
I've been impressed with just how much you can achieve with Alpha Five without a single line of code and only the odd glance at the documentation. Certainly there are things they could improve on: the database designer felt a little clunky and the integration between web components and the database definition could have been stronger. I also worry about deployment issues - I can imagine that the restrictions I described will put some people off.
However, if things seem workable from the deployment angle and you're looking to build database-backed web applications or desktop applications for internal use, it's certainly worth downloading the 30 day evaluation. It may well handle what you're wanting without a great deal of effort, as in my example. And as you get bigger in the future, it's good to know that it can back onto SQL Server for safe, high performance data storage and has its own scripting language to let you do the less usual things.
While I wouldn't recommend it for every situation where you need to build web or desktop frontends to databases, it is well suited to intranet and in-house corporate applications. If you put the deployment issues and niggles aside, it provides a far better way to develop database-backed applications than the widespread "hand-rolled" approach, and is certainly the direction that web development should be heading in: eliminating code when we can generate it by simply declaring what we want.
You will note their is an option for placing your comments at the end of the review on their site. If you choose to jump in with support, we cant say that we will be unhappy :)
Thanks
The link to the review is here:
http://www.programmersheaven.com/use...of-Alpha-Five/
is a site that is well known for programming tools. It promotes itself as follows "This site is dedicated to programmers all over the world. Our main goal is to provide a complete start-off for programming related web surfing and file downloading." On occasion they decide to run reviews of products that they think are interesting or important in some way. So we were very happy to see that they decided to review Alpha Five Version 8. The full review is linked below and their conclusion was:
Final Thoughts
I've been impressed with just how much you can achieve with Alpha Five without a single line of code and only the odd glance at the documentation. Certainly there are things they could improve on: the database designer felt a little clunky and the integration between web components and the database definition could have been stronger. I also worry about deployment issues - I can imagine that the restrictions I described will put some people off.
However, if things seem workable from the deployment angle and you're looking to build database-backed web applications or desktop applications for internal use, it's certainly worth downloading the 30 day evaluation. It may well handle what you're wanting without a great deal of effort, as in my example. And as you get bigger in the future, it's good to know that it can back onto SQL Server for safe, high performance data storage and has its own scripting language to let you do the less usual things.
While I wouldn't recommend it for every situation where you need to build web or desktop frontends to databases, it is well suited to intranet and in-house corporate applications. If you put the deployment issues and niggles aside, it provides a far better way to develop database-backed applications than the widespread "hand-rolled" approach, and is certainly the direction that web development should be heading in: eliminating code when we can generate it by simply declaring what we want.
You will note their is an option for placing your comments at the end of the review on their site. If you choose to jump in with support, we cant say that we will be unhappy :)
Thanks
The link to the review is here:
http://www.programmersheaven.com/use...of-Alpha-Five/