“A Behind The Scenes Look In Creating Web Applications With Alpha Five Version 10 - part 2”

Richard Rabins – Alpha Five Version 10

Complete Transcript of Interview

Let's Talk Computers Radio Talk Show

Host Alan Ashendorf

October 31, 2009

Alan: Today more businesses than ever are relying on web applications to run all aspects of their business, from maintaining customer information to tracking inventory, to even selling products to customers anywhere in the world. From a user’s viewpoint, today’s web applications have to be easy to use and navigate and even more important – must be able to instantaneously update any information that needs to be displayed on their screen.

And from the viewpoint of a web developer, web application developing tools must be able to create reliable, robust, and powerful applications that can be created extremely fast, easy to maintain, and yet powerful enough to access any type of data from any data source.

Today we are continuing our conversation, talking about what I believe is a milestone in web application development tools – Alpha Five, Version 10, with Richard Rabins, Co-Chairman of Alpha Five Software. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Richard.

Richard: It’s good to be back with you today, Alan.

Alan: Richard, we have been talking about your newest product, Alpha Five, Version 10 and how it is giving developers what they have really been looking for in a web application development tool – to be able to quickly develop web applications that are using new technology like AJAX, which allows the user to see only what needs to be updated on their screen instead of having to see the whole screen refresh. And now you have super-powerful grids, where let’s say we have a customer database that is displaying customers and now you can click on any cell and expand that cell into a whole new grid or expand that grid into a whole new screen or even multiple screens. If you want to put, say 5 customers, side-by-side for a comparison, with your Liquid Form technology, all the fields in each of the screens can size, automatically. And all of this comes with full search capability.

And because of utilizing the new technology of AJAX and not having to refresh each screen, from the user’s point of view it is extremely fast and very smooth. And best of all, all of this is possible for web developers - without having to write a single line of code!

Richard: Well, that’s right, Alan. That’s an example of if you were trying to replicate something like that in a traditional client/server desktop app, it would be incredibly hard to do because this relies on the principal of AJAX, which is a minimal amount of data going back and forth and only getting the data from the back end database that you need, when you need it.

Alan: And from the user’s point of view, it really doesn’t make any difference to them what the backend data source is. The front end is what the user is going to be looking at and now the user is going to be saying, “Wow!” because it is so seamless and there is no need for pop-ups anymore to put in information or to do screen refreshes that slow the user down. The user doesn’t have to push the back arrow constantly to get to the previous screens because there was a pop-up in front of it. Everything looks and flows just like a desktop application – without the desktop.

Richard: Exactly. I think that’s why there was a big fuss when Google announced they were going to have a web operating system and I think even as little as 18 months ago, I would have been skeptical, but the reality is you can now build really very sophisticated purely web-based applications that need nothing other than standard browsers for the user. An example of the power in this feature is that I saw another customer app that showed me recently which also brings up the issue of comparable advantage of an insurance company and they wanted to have a pricing application for customers for home insurance where you could go and literally just type in your street address and the data would be taken into an Alpha Five database.

And then on the backend (in this case it was SQL Server) and they would be looking at your street address and comparing it against databases of where all the fire hydrants were, it happened to be in Florida, How close to your house is a fire hydrant and another database that was looking at how far your house was from the ocean and one or two other factors of risks. And then they would be looking at the pricing table. And literally, this whole process, with maybe a second a second and a half, would come back and ether say either “yes sir unfortunately we can’t offer you insurance,” because they have run thru their whole model and concluded there was just not good risk insurance or your insurance for this property would be X dollars. This whole process, as I say, was less than a second and a half.

Since they had instituted the system they had started to see the number of policies they were writing, compared to their competitors had just exploded, because the competitor’s process was not web-based, it was manual-based; it was slow; and they would take weeks before a customer would get an answer and these guys were literally giving answers through the work, having gone through the full underwriting process in about a second and a half.

Alan: Speed is so important because in your database search engine, you can actually go through a million records and bring back just a hundred records in a split-second; where I have seen other applications hat have to bring back the whole million records to the client side. You don’t do that, do you?

Richard: That’s the power when you make an Alpha Five frontend to a SQL backend. The SQL backend engines have been used around since the 70’s and have matured to the point now where it doesn’t really matter if there are 10 million records or a million records in the database, if you design the system right you should get the same kind of performance, it should make no difference.

Alan: You see other applications that are going to the Web that it takes forever for them to pull the records back. If it is somebody in your own company that has to use the application, they are going to complain. But, if it is somebody who is not in your own company and is trying to buy something from you and has to wait and wait and wait for this grid to populate – what do they usually do?

Richard: They go to your competitors.

Alan: And that’s what we are seeing more and more, because the Web is the equalizer now, isn’t it?

Richard: It is sort of happening now in many ways. The Web is not just about technology – it’s fundamental economics. We are seeing that for people who embrace the Web and in particular this Web 2.0’s view of the world where the Web can be very interactive and very fast that is giving you a real advantage. And in fact if you break it up into different segments, if you are a business owner, just like this insurance example we talked about, they are getting a competitor’s edge. If you are a developer and you embrace this new technology and new approach like Alpha Five Version 10 it gives you a competitive edge, being able to build these kinds of applications and then the third segment that we are seeing a lot of interest from is what I would call “entrepreneurs” – people who have a lot of knowledge about their particular industry, whether it’s the plumbing industry, the construction industry, the litigation support industry, what have you. And they are now seeing that building fast, modern web apps gives them a chance to get a jump over other, maybe established players in their industry and build whole businesses around the idea of making it a modern, fast, highly interactive, ubiquitous application.

Alan: Since you are almost taking the programmer and putting the programmer inside of the (not so much the IT department), but inside the executive part of the company, where they could actually sit there and decide, “Well, I like this, but I really would rather make it look like this and I want to change this,” They can do that, without going out and saying, “Well, my programmers should be back in about a week and he can do this for me.” They can now do it for themselves, can’t they?

Richard: The whole idea of the PC revolution, which has obviously been going on since the early ‘80’s, has been about empowerment. So, the fact that with our new version, someone who has got a logical mind and understands their business, whether they are a high school principle or manufacturing company or service company, they can do amazing things, themselves with this tool. And in addition, in the hands of a professional IT person, they can do super amazing things with the tool.

Alan: You and I grew up in the world where we did so much stuff in spreadsheets or we did so much stuff in DOS we didn’t have to be programmers to do it; we just basically decided what needed to be done and as we are looking at the application, we are making modifications and going on. We were getting to a point that you almost had to be an absolute technical programmer to use some of these technical tools that are there – Visual Basic.NET for instance. It takes away from the people that understand the business logic of the company; not it’s the programming part.

However, now we are seeing the reverse of it. We are seeing people that understand the business logic who can actually get in there and write their own applications.

Richard: Alan, that’s an excellent point that I can vouch for. What we found is that most people have a specific requirement and needs some system to do x-y-z. Because of this tool we are able to spend the time with the customer to really understand their business and understand their business needs. There is relatively little time developing the app because once we know what needs to be done, the building becomes fairly straightforward and quite rapid. The beauty of that is that at the end of the day if we have invested the time to understand the workflow and the logic and the requirements the net result is you get a better outcome.

There is another example of an application that we are building for a client that has to do with hiring. If you think about it when you get like a food chain, like a McDonald’s opening up a new store in a new location and they have got to hire a couple of hundred people – a lot of them are part-time, some are full-time. The whole process is a pain. They have to run ads and people fill out paper forms and then you have people that are going to go through the work and keep track of it, it’s a whole workflow.

We are working on a system, now, which is a Web-based form, for your clients. You need some pre-determined criteria. If the answer is “yes” it can be automated and you go to the next step, then you get the workflow and the manager opens up his browser, he gets told there are 10 new resumes for review. They have already gone through some automated of screening. He or she can then bring that person in for an interview and everybody knows what happened in the interview or the authorized other managers can now know and it goes all the way through once the person is hired to filling out all the federal tax forms, etc. This just makes this whole process that more efficient. It saves a huge amount of time and it just makes people more productive and efficient.

If you are talking about two different companies using a system like this that is highly interactive vs. either a slow Web-based system or a paper-based system. It’s a no-brainer who’s going to be more effective and more efficient and have a better process.

Alan: Alpha Five Version 10 is now just being released. If you are a Web developer, this is the version you really want to take a real hard look at. If they would like to find out more information about this new version, Richard, what should they do?

Richard: They can send an email to marketing@alphasoftware.com or they can go to the website, www.alphasoftware.com. We also have a very interactive, information-rich blog, which is blog.alphasoftware.com .

Alan: Richard, we are out of time. We will have to pick up this conversation, talking about how the true client/server system, built into Alpha Five, Version 10 assists developers to create very powerful Web applications next time.

Richard: Alan thanks a lot for the time and you have a good day.