Hello,
I have some newbie questions about Alpha Five and MySQL. I've pored over the Alpha Five site and figure I should be able to puzzle out the answer but as a nonprogrammer probably don't know enough terminology to see the answer staring me in the face.
* When it says the Platinum edition lets you "use Alpha Five with SQL backend data sources, like MySQL or SQL Server," does that mean you can create Web database solutions that don't require the Web Application Server in order to run online?
What I want to end up with is a database site using PHP and MySQL on the virtual host I'm already using, which does not offer the Alpha 5 application server. Using Alpha Five, could I build and test my database offline, then push a button that says, "Translate all this for MySQL, and create Web pages with PHP scripts to run the queries I've specified"?
(And if so, I'd need Platinum, right?)
* Years ago I used Alpha Four v3 and PageMaker to crank out catalogs -- used the reports to put PageMaker codes around product data and printed to file, then imported into PageMaker. Piece of cake. Then when we decided to put the catalog online, I was able to do the same thing with HTML tags. Without programming. This was the early '90s, and the boss thought I was a genius. (I miss those days <g>)
But when the first versions of Alpha Five came out, I didn't have so much luck with the Windows way of doing things. "Print to file" did not work the same way at all. Got lots of empty spaces and garbage characters. I surfed your message boards off and on over the years and saw lots of people with the same problem, and they were advised to do tricky things with Xbasic.
Too complicated for me, I'm afraid. I just wanted "print to file" to work like it used to. I think I read somewhere that people are using FileMaker to crank out Quark-ready documents, but am loathe to try to figure out another database. I've got some catalog-type projects coming up in the future and thought I might ask you guys again. Does Alpha Five v9 make it easy again to print cleanly to a file? Or is some sort of programming involved?
Thanks for your time,
Lauren W.
I have some newbie questions about Alpha Five and MySQL. I've pored over the Alpha Five site and figure I should be able to puzzle out the answer but as a nonprogrammer probably don't know enough terminology to see the answer staring me in the face.
* When it says the Platinum edition lets you "use Alpha Five with SQL backend data sources, like MySQL or SQL Server," does that mean you can create Web database solutions that don't require the Web Application Server in order to run online?
What I want to end up with is a database site using PHP and MySQL on the virtual host I'm already using, which does not offer the Alpha 5 application server. Using Alpha Five, could I build and test my database offline, then push a button that says, "Translate all this for MySQL, and create Web pages with PHP scripts to run the queries I've specified"?
(And if so, I'd need Platinum, right?)
* Years ago I used Alpha Four v3 and PageMaker to crank out catalogs -- used the reports to put PageMaker codes around product data and printed to file, then imported into PageMaker. Piece of cake. Then when we decided to put the catalog online, I was able to do the same thing with HTML tags. Without programming. This was the early '90s, and the boss thought I was a genius. (I miss those days <g>)
But when the first versions of Alpha Five came out, I didn't have so much luck with the Windows way of doing things. "Print to file" did not work the same way at all. Got lots of empty spaces and garbage characters. I surfed your message boards off and on over the years and saw lots of people with the same problem, and they were advised to do tricky things with Xbasic.
Too complicated for me, I'm afraid. I just wanted "print to file" to work like it used to. I think I read somewhere that people are using FileMaker to crank out Quark-ready documents, but am loathe to try to figure out another database. I've got some catalog-type projects coming up in the future and thought I might ask you guys again. Does Alpha Five v9 make it easy again to print cleanly to a file? Or is some sort of programming involved?
Thanks for your time,
Lauren W.
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