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AlwaysOn Heralds Alpha Anywhere 3.0 for Building Offline Applications

Alpha Anywhere mobile app development softwareWe announced Alpha Anywhere 3.0 this week.  The reaction has been swift and very positive. New features released with Alpha Anywhere 3.0 make building mobile apps that work in an offline environment easier. Built-in support for offline data caching and synchronization make creating an app that works in a disconnected environment easier than ever. Providing offline access is a must-have feature for enterprise-quality mobile applications.

We were also excited to see the announcement featured prominently on the www.aonetwork.com  website because of the role they play in the IT industry.

Alpha Software launches robust offline mobile solution

Published Wed, October 1, 2014
The challenges of offline mobile support, in which devices connect in-and-out of transient networks without compromising data, are often the most complex (and expensive) solutions for developers to implement in mobile applications. Yet these solutions deliver very robust business value and unparalleled user experience, and have become the most important features in modern-day mobile applications.

"THE OFFLINE MOBILE CHALLENGE"

Outlined in a very recent Forrester Research publication, offline support comes in three different categories:

Client-side read-only cache of static content, which occurs when app users simply need to read content while disconnected, binds the UI to a local data model and uses the networks to dynamically update the UI for the user.

Lightweight "last write wins" CRUD synchronization, which allows users to create, read, update, and delete content when conflict resolution policies are nonexistent.

And lastly, complete transactional synchronization with conflict resolution, which allows robust offline functionality that maintains the transactional integrity on the back-end data store. This permits full mobile functionality, along with "fine-grained control" of back-end conflict resolution.

In addition to the three flavors of offline mobile solutions outlined above, further considerations must also be addressed for a comprehensive model. These include: incremental synchronization of large data sets to ensure full execution; securitization of all data, regardless of connected state; and finally, the UI for conflict resolution cannot detract from the overall user experience, (i.e. in a highly dynamic data environment, a barrage of questions about what data should be stored can overwhelm, and often upset, the user).

FORRESTER'S CHALLENGES HAVE BEEN SOLVED

Alpha Software, which was selected as one of AlwayOn's "Global 100 Companies to Watch", has developed the industry's first mobile application deployment environment with robust offline support built-in, solving the challenges addressed by the recent Forrester report. The new software, Alpha Anywhere 3.0, allows offline-capable transactional business apps to be built, without adding any cost or time. The leading independent research firm recognizes Alpha Anywhere as a low-code application platform, "which supports a very robust solution for HTML5 implementation."
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About Author

Richard Rabins
Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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