Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

About to Evaluate again - Soliciting Comments

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    About to Evaluate again - Soliciting Comments

    I have evaluated Alpha in the past, and I have concluded it is a Great product. But, to date I have not taken the plunge with developing with it, for a few reasons:

    - Legacy back to an old DOS product and concerns that it may run out of steam for big, production applications.

    - Need for all the power of the desktop development tool to be in the web app development tool, and concerns that this was not the case

    - Repercussions at work, with most people not being familiar with the software. :) [We're a .NET shop]

    I just received an e-mail announcement for V8, so I'll be evaluating it again at home.

    My needs:

    - Power and flexibility meeting or exceeding what we do today with .NET web app development

    - Shorter development time than what we experience today with .NET web app development

    - 100% bulletproof results, with app and server reliability, and no hard-to-debug problems relating to memory leaks or required server reboots

    - Web apps that can serve a community of say, 100 connected users simultaneously, without breaking a sweat.

    Is this the product for me, or am I out of the target market?
    Thanks.

    Frank
    Frank R

    #2
    Re: About to Evaluate again - Soliciting Comments

    Cmon folks - don't any of you experienced users want to help sell the message about Alpha?

    I'm very encouraged about what I saw in the product last night, but I won't get comfortable without some real world success stories.
    Frank R

    Comment


      #3
      Re: About to Evaluate again - Soliciting Comments

      Frank,

      This is an excellent question without a simple answer.

      The views stated below are my opinion based on working with Alpha Five and the WAS since version 6.

      I have my own web server running the WAS. My server is a 2Ghz Hewlett Packard with 1GB of RAM and dual 160GB drives, running MS Windows Server 2003. This server is tied to the net through a T1. This has proven to be reliable and fast. I can log in remotely for administration purposes and I use FTP for updates.

      My web applications utilize Alpha Five for both the database (local tables) and the web server. Some of my tables have over 17,000 records. So I’m using just one server and my applications performance is OK for the load that I’m experiencing at this time. However, I’m not running Amazon.com !

      There are SO many issues to think about when building a large scale web app that it’s really hard to generalize.

      Any large scale web development project is going to require the use of a dedicated database server or group of servers running MySql, Oracle, SQL Server, etc. In this scenario the WAS is sitting between the browser and the database server. It is making requests of the database server and the server is replying to the WAS which is then handling session management and replying to the browser. The WAS will allow you to use all of the Alpha Five components, printing and report capability, etc. so you can rapidly build and test your applications. This is going to offer your developers a huge benefit when it comes to rapidly prototyping and developing reliable web applications over ASP or PHP.

      That said, in all levels of programming, nothing beats really tight efficient code. If speed is your primary concern, you’re going to have to steer away from components and look to hand coding, but Alpha offers you this option with Xbasic and Javascript so you’re not boxing yourself in no matter what path you choose. This is really a key point!

      Now let’s look at Web 2.0 options. I like to develop using Flash but the options are many (Flex, Ajax, etc). With the power of Xbasic and Javascript, I can use any of these RIA architectures and still have the benefits and simplicity of the Alpha WAS. Once again, I haven’t boxed myself in.

      My only concerns with the WAS are in scalability. I don’t think multi-threading and multi-processor support is available at this time. Load balancing and utilization of multiple servers is supposedly do-able through the use of Apache but I don’t have any experience with this.

      Overall, I think you’ll be quite surprised at the results you’re going to get. Alpha Five is worth a very serious look and it certainly isn’t a stagnant product. The team at Alpha is very talented and the spirit is quite entrepreneurial. This is where great ideas and products come from.

      So give it an honest try and feel free to lean on all the members of this board.

      We’d all love to see you succeed. :)
      Bob Moore


      Comment

      Working...
      X