"Introduction to Alpha Five Version 9 - Platinum Edition Part 6"
How To Create business Applications With all The must Have Features - Automatically

Richard Rabins - Alpha Five Version 9

Complete Transcript of Interview

Let's Talk Computers Radio Talk Show

Host Alan Ashendorf

March 21, 2009

Alan: If you talk to any developer they will always tell you the first 90 % of any software applications goes really fast. It’s the last 10% that seems to take forever.

Wouldn’t it be nice to already have the last 10 % done for you automatically? Our guest today is Richard Rabins, Co-Chairman of Alpha Software. Welcome back to let’s Talk Computers, Richard.

Richard: Alan, it’s a pleasure to be back with you.

Alan: Richard it’s that last 10 % of all software that seems to take forever. But these are the items that must be included in all applications. But developers always have to write code for every application that they write.

Take reports for instance. All applications must have reports. And to have a report that is both visual ably pleasing and have it where a user can decide exactly what information that they want to see can be so time consuming to program.

But now in Alpha 5 Version 9 you have made it extremely easy for developers to create just this type of report.

Richard: If you step back for a moment and think about database applications, whether it’s a system that’s managing school, information; whether it’s an order entry system; whether it’s a non-profit where you are keeping track of donations – at some point in the cycle you want to be able to sort of summarize the data. That’s what reports are all about. Reports are a mechanism for looking at the entire data or a filtered section of the data and summarizing it in a meaningful management way.

And so since the beginning of data processing, report writing has always been a very important part of most applications. And that is why for a long time we have made sure that Alpha Five has had a very powerful, robust visual report writer.

What we have done in this latest revision of Alpha Five is added what you mentioned, interactive reporting or what is sometimes called, "drill down reporting." What that means is that it allows you as the manager who is looking at the data, looking at reports to start exploring the data.

For example, you might be looking at a report that summarizes overall sales and you may think to yourself, "Umh, I wonder what the sales are like in the eastern region vs. the northern region?" So you can then click on a hot link in your report that brings up another report that is just the eastern region or the western region and then in the western region you may say, ", "Umh, I wonder which products are selling best?" And then you can click on an area in this report and you will see your sales broken up by product or you can click on somewhere else and see your sales broken up by sales person.

So, it allows you to do interactive analysis of your data. This is a very powerful new feature in the latest version of Alpha Five.

Alan: So, when we are looking at a record we can just drill down in that record as deep as we want to go in order to get the information that we need?

Richard: Right. Because, at the end of the day the summary consists of an aggregation of data at increasingly lower levels, so drill down allows you to go down as many levels as necessary to get your answer.

Alan: So many companies make a really serious mistake by thinking that when you are writing an application as long as the end user is happy with it and can actually put the data in and do the transactions you are done.

However, the CEO or the president of the company wants to see what is going on and having these reports where they could just look at it and drill down as far as they want to – that is a major part of decision-making, isn’t it?

Richard: Yes. I think that there are at least two fundamental benefits of custom-applications. One is what one must call transactional ways – it’s a question of placing an order; querying to find when the customer placed the order or in the case of the school example, looking at John Smith and quickly being able to see his record. So, that’s the sort of query transaction aspect and it’s very valuable and databases are wonderful, there.

But, as you mentioned databases also are sitting on all this data and having the ability to aggregate and summarize the data and provide what is called by some people, "business intelligence," that is to understand what the heck is really going on in your business and by giving the CEO or executives or the owner of the company the ability to summarize and ask "What if questions." Or they might ask, "What is going on with my business" type questions.

These are questions like finding out that you may be selling different styles of sweaters and without reporting, you wouldn’t know which sweaters are most profitable; which parts of the county you sold a certain style of sweater and which sales people are being effective. All this kind of data, which is often actionable in terms of if you are finding out for example, that you are not selling blue sweaters in California because you have stock not half the time, but when you do have blue sweaters available they sell like hot cakes in California. The actional item is to make sure that you are make sure that you warehouse is shipping more blue sweaters to California and are keeping them supplied.

Alan: Well, you are talking about the satisfaction that an end user gets when working with your application. Take for instance, the little bitty things that have been added into it like column formatting. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked at a browse on a screen and it’s a whole bunch of words that have either wrapped around, which makes everything look so awful looking or it has been truncated so that I can’t find what is at the end of it. You have something that allows us to have more over there.

Richard: And that’s just another example as you said that may seem like a small issue, but imagine if you are a developer who is trying to build a browse and you present it to the client and the data is going into the browse columns and it’s not wrapping properly and it’s sort of blending into the next column, which looks ugly. The CEO, who doesn’t know that much computing, just looks at it and says, "This guy is not professional; this guy doesn’t have his act together."

So, even though all the data is there; it is sorting correcting; it’s readable; it’s presentable, you could argue that it’s working, but these issues cause dissatisfaction. And so, I think part of the benefit here is that we are living in a new world with all kinds of new-age tools emerging everyday.

We have been out there talking to customers; selling to products and over the years we have sold over 1,000,000 copies of Alpha Four and then Alpha Five and all of these features, these little touches are the result of real-world feedback from customers.

Alan: Well, I know I see a lot of the suggestions that I have made over the years, because I’ve known you for over 20-25 years, now.

Richard: It has been a long time

Alan: Watching the application grow each year and seeing all these new features that we have been asking for. You listen to your customer base, don’t you?

Richard: We do. I think that is only if you watch you watch our message board, you will see people are surprised at everybody at the company – the developers; the marketing people are all interacting with our customers, both from our message board and also both from email. We are trying to make sure that as many people internally are copied on customer service emails; marketing emails; tech emails as possible. Because, being informed gives you a much better chance of responding and like any business, whether you are making cars or software or vinyl siding. The more you can understand what your customers are looking for. If you can respond, you are going to stay in business, (number one) and you are going to grow, (number 2). Luckily, that has been the case with us.

Alan: I know, little things that you do like your browses, now being able to have images inside the browses. This allows us to spice it up so the user is not looking at a boring grid.

Richard: Right. And again, in the sort of "little touch" department, the browse will now automatically scale the image so the image will just fit in the allotted area without you, as the developer having to worry about size and setting up your browse, accordingly. We take care of that for you.

Alan: And setting up things like smart fields that when we are looking at something on the screen and say an item goes negative you can on the fly, make it change colors.

Richard: Right. There is a ton of logic control. At the end of the day underneath Alpha is a full-blown language of which Xdialogue is part of. The language is Xbasic and Xbasic is absolutely available as part of Alpha Five to more advanced developers. And so, you can do anything in Xbasic, but being able to change colors and things like that, that’s all doable in a genie or a wizard control.

Alan: You also have the Server Editions; because when I am working on the Web this is where the power comes with the back-end being the server.

Richard: Right. We designed the app server, which is the vehicle or piece of software that you can load up on any Windows machine and that serves your application to an unlimited number of users on the Web, so it is very convenient. You don’t have to worry about whether it will be five users of your app or thousands or even more. It is unlimited and that’s a piece of software that is on any Windows server, whether it’s your PC at home that’s connected through your cable modem or it could be a dedicated machine in a company or it could be a VPS or dedicated machine at any ISP.

In addition, we haven’t started shipping it, but it’s in beta now – we have what is called a Full Cluster Manager for companies who are building applications where uptime is crucial and scalability is crucial. The Cluster Manager allows us to actually have and manage multiple machines that work together in a cluster to provide things like failover, scalability, redundancy. The real benefits are that you can start adding many, many users on the Web App. It could eve be in the millions and you don’t want to have to worry for example, if there is a hard drive failure on one of the machines or there is a power failure.

Failover means that there is a Customer Manager that’s managing the load between the different systems. This is very similar to a power grid where you’ve got lots of generating capacity, so if one power station goes out, you don’t want the lights to go out; it just starts getting its power from somewhere else.

Alan: Yes, because if you are on the Web and you are working with customers who are also on the Web you can’t have any downtime; because every customer that goes to your site and says, "Oh, it’s not working." They will then go elsewhere; they are not going to wait for you, are they?

Richard: No. I think the critical thing for real-world applications is this concept of availability. You really don’t want your site to go down. Fortunately, the price of hardware has plummeted. The price of memory has plummeted and so a cluster, which might have 4-5 or 6 machines working as backup which provides you with more throughput and also with more reliability. And as a result, the costs of building these clusters are actually quite modest, these days.

Alan: Most companies don’t realize that when you get on the Web, you are competing heads-up with the Home Depots, the Amazons, and the other big boys out there. And so, if your application doesn’t look and feel the same way and is as quick as these big guys, your customers will go elsewhere.

Richard: Right. I think your point is absolutely right. The Web is a leveler, both good and bad. That means that if you do it right, you can look every bit as good as Home Depot, etc., which is the good news. The bad news is that if you have got a slow app that is down more than it should be and is a pain for people to use; it is a sure way of turning customers away.

And so, the key ingredients in building a web app with the tools we have are a very strong HTML and Cascading Style Sheet support, so you can make the app look every bit as great as your artistically design skills allow and you can actually build one of the HTML outlines in either the Alpha HTML editor or any HTML tool of your choice. So, the visual is very important.

We have covered the speed and that’s where the AJAX capability comes where you literally can make the app perform very well.

And then, the third thing is just the professionalism of the app, which is also where AJAX comes in because that gives you very, very fine control of your app. As an example we have built an application where, depending on where you are filling in a web form, if you switch from the country of the United States to the country of Canada the changes the field from states to province. That does it on the Web, with no page reloading, as that would be too costly in terms of time. It just changes that through what is called an AJAX call-back. You’ve got this very professional looking app.

And then the final piece is at least the option of plastering a bunch of machines together, which gives you very high availability, reliability and scalability.

Alan: Yes, there is the old saying that, "A satisfied customer tells 10 people; a dissatisfied customer tells hundreds."

Richard: Right. And I believe there is a lot of truth to that.

Alan: Well, it’s even worse now, because now they have their own blogs and all they do now – satisfied people write little notes saying, "Hey, I’m happy with this. Try it out." However, a dissatisfied person gets even by putting it up on a blog and millions of people see it.

Richard: Absolutely. If the Internet game is a two-edged sword; it’s an incredibly powerful broadcasting mechanism for sometimes messages that we would just as soon not be broadcast.

Alan: If somebody would like to find more information about Alpha Five Platinum, where would they go?

Richard: They would just go to the Alpha Website – http:///www.alphasoftware.com

Alan: Richard it has been a real pleasure having you as our guest talking about all the features you have added to Alpha 5 Version 9 and I look forward to talking to again real soon.

Richard: Alan I really have enjoyed being with you again and thank you for the opportunity. Be well.