"The way you get programmer productivity is not by increasing the line of code per programmer per day. That doesn't work. The way you get programmer productivity is by eliminating lines of code you have to write. The line of code that is the fastest to write, that never breaks, that never needs maintenance is the line that you never have to write. The goal here is to eliminate 80% of the code that you have to write for your app. That's the goal." Steve Jobs - 1994
Think about it – when selecting an environment for building and deploying business apps for creating both mobile and web solutions, there are a number of considerations to think about, but invariably it comes down to two key criteria:
Confidence/Power and Productivity
The first big consideration is "confidence/power." Developers want to know if the the platform has the horsepower to complete the mission (s) that they are tasked with and they want to be sure that there is no real risk that they can wind up in a situation where the platform's limitations prevent them from completing the mission fully (By way of analogy, if you need to get from New York to London, getting to Dublin is close but you have failed to complete the mission.) The second big consideration is "productivity." (Getting the job done, but done late is generally not an acceptable option because of business and competitive reasons. ) Licensing, support and hosting costs often factor into the decision too, but they are often taken into account after the two big considerations discussed above are dealt with.Meeting the two key criteria is where Alpha Anywhere shines with its unique approach which is carefully designed to give developers both high levels of confidence/power and high productivity
Because of the depth and richness of the components in Alpha Anywhere (which do not require coding,) developers are telling us that they can get 90 to 95% (or more) of complex projects built with the Alpha Anywhere components . They also are telling us that for simpler projects you can get the entire application built with no coding. This ability to get a huge percentage of the job done without coding gives Alpha Anywhere its tremendous productivity!Ok that's great, but what about the last 10% or 5%?
Here is where Alpha Anywhere’s approach gives developers and companies a critical competitive advantage.
How does Alpha Anywhere's approach work?.
- Alpha Anywhere's components are declarative - you set properties that define the behavior you want from the system and then Alpha Anywhere writes the appropriate back-end and front-end code to achieve this result.
- You can also inject code throughout the components because the Alpha Anywhere event model is so rich and granular (on both the client side and the server side)
- The benefit of this approach is that you can constantly go back and forth and refine the property settings in the components and the only code you have to deal with is the code that you write yourself. The code you write on the client side can either be generated through Alpha's Action JavaScript or by writing straight JavaScript. On the server side you can take advantage of Stored procedure, server side JavaScript (coming soon) or using Alpha Anywhere's powerful Xbasic langauge
- This approach encourages you to iterate a lot as you build and refine your applications in Alpha Anywhere
How is this different from a code-generation approach?
- A wizard gets you started by asking you to specify properties. It then generates code.
- You can add your own code to the generated code to add customization, but this normally requires that you understand all of the generated code (which is often complex)
- Also, should you decide that the properties you set when you initially used the wizard were wrong (or you want to change them for whatever reason,) and you need to go back to the wizard, you will be starting over, and the custom code that you added is generally lost.
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