BURLINGTON, Mass.—15th May 2008—Alpha Software is now shipping Alpha Five Platinum Edition, the ninth major release of the company’s flagship Web database development platform. It’s the first development tool that can visually build AJAX-powered Web 2.0 applications, integrate SQL databases with drag & drop simplicity, and deliver enterprise-scale availability, without having to write pages of computer code.
While coding is optional, Alpha Five’s integrated development environment (IDE) still gives developers full access to forms, interactive reports, browses, web components, APIs, XML , and more. It’s packed with 200 reusable ActionScripts, components, and new “Supercontrols;”;HTML and CSS builders; the full Xbasic/Xdialog language; Portable SQL; and “Genies” that generate editable code for any custom requirement.
There’s also a full-featured drill-down custom report generator, a role-based Web security framework, and native SQL support for every major database—including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, IBM DB2, and EnterpriseDB/Postgres Plus.
“Building state-of-the-art business applications for the Web that perform with desktop-like speed just got dramatically easier and faster,,” says Richard Rabins, Co-Chairman of Alpha Software. “With Alpha Five Platinum, you can build 100 percent pure Internet and Intranet apps that look, feel, and perform like desktop applications. In addition, with Alpha, you can build them up to 10 times faster than .Net, Java, PHP, Perl, Python, or Ruby. We think developers will agree that Alpha Five Platinum is the ultimate front-end for their enterprise data.”
Alpha Five Platinum boasts 85 new features, key among them:
- AJAX for everyone. Alpha Five Platinum is the first development tool that makes it easy to build AJAX-powered Web applications. Extensive knowledge of JavaScript, XML, or an AJAX framework is not required. AJAX applications are built in a fraction of the time other tools require. One of the hottest development technologies today, AJAX allows developers to ship applications that behave and perform interactively, like desktop apps. Users don’t have to click SUBMIT buttons to get feedback or flag data entry errors. Instead, they interact in real-time with the online screen, just as they do with offline desktop apps. But building AJAX apps has been a complex process for developers, with a steep learning curve. Now, with Alpha Five Platinum, the learning curve is gone, and the process has been simplified to a drag & drop operation. No other developer tool builds AJAX apps faster.
- Application Server Improvements, including a new Cluster Manager for automatic load balancing and unattended fail-over of enterprise-class database applications; GZIP compression to turbo-charge data transfer performance; Persistent Connections to optimize network traffic and improve latency; and Pipelining to more efficiently fetch batches of files from the server (such as embedded style sheets and images).
- Active Link Tables that turn several SQL databases into one. Just a few clicks links multiple SQL databases—including those with stored procedures—into virtual tables, complete with insert, delete, and update support. Developers can build Forms, Browses, Reports, Labels, Letters, and more against distributed SQL data, as if they were native tables.
- Interactive Reporting that allow for drilling down or drilling through data to provide business intelligence
- Mapped Tables that allow developers to define virtual tables that display data from one or more physical tables.
- Heterogeneous Joins, which allow developers to join tables from multiple SQL database servers, or a server and a local table, within the same query.
- Intelligent Query Optimizer that achieves optimal performance by determining where filtering and sorting should be done: on the client or on the server.
- Optimistic Record Locking lets multiple users view and edit the same database record, without locking anyone out.
- Supercontrols that let developers embed hyperlinks, Web content, clocks, calendars, PDFs, live reports, and more in their database forms, with point and click ease.
- Alpha Five forms can include HTML forms with regular HTML tags and special Alpha Five tags - accordion, tab, conditional, dynamic content, image).
- XML Parser
- HTML Memo Fields that offer more formatting power than RTF (rich text) memos, and support rich media types, such as images, videos, and hyperlinks.
- Enhanced Field Rules allow lookup windows to display images, be resized or edited, or have new values added.
In all, Alpha Five Platinum sports 85 new or enhanced features. The complete set of new features in Alpha Five Platinum can be reviewed at http://www.alphasoftware.com/alphafive/platinum/. Insights into Alpha Five Platinum’s new features are being posted daily to the company’s blog, at http://blog.alphasoftware.com. Each posting covers one feature and provides a description and demo video that illustrates how the feature is used, and the benefits the feature brings to developers. The latest feature listing can be viewed at http://snipr.com/a5v9features.
Price and Availability:
Alpha Five Platinum Edition is available now through the UK Distributor, PX Software. A single user license is available at £189.99 inc. www.pxsoftware.co.uk
