I recently was on a phone demo of an application that Web App Express is building for a large engineering company supporting the oil industry. During the discussion, we touched on the high reliability shown by another application the company built with our platform.
Scott Lines, the lead developer of the application, made two interesting comments about Alpha Five v11 during the course of the demo. The first one relates to a well-known core benefit of Alpha Five: productivity. The second comment related to something that is not quite so obvious, but is nevertheless also very important, namely the reliability of applications built in Alpha Five v11. At the end of the call I asked Scott if he could elaborate on this theme. He has now done this in the reply below.
Alpha Five v11 - Reliability
By: Scott Lines of Web App Express
First, a little bit of information about my background. I've been a software developer since the early 1980's, starting out as a programmer developing, of all things, accounting systems in Assembler language! During my career, I have designed, developed, implemented and supported systems for business clients in dozens of industries. Examples of these systems include retail purchase order, retail PC-based point-of-sale, data warehousing, intranet portal, labor forecasting, task management, e-commerce applications, and electronic payment systems. In each of the examples listed, I was directly responsible and worked "hands-on" from system inception through implementation. Over the past five years alone, our company, Web App Express Ltd has built and installed systems that are relied upon every day by small companies as well as Fortune 500 companies.Since 2007, Web App Express has been developing systems exclusively in Alpha Five. We chose Alpha Five for many of the “typical” reasons that anyone chooses Alpha Five:
- rapid application development along with a rich event model for programmability
- ability to connect to virtually any back-end data source
- ability to build robust business applications for the desktop and web mobile devices
- powerful reporting, mapping, charting, scheduling, image and video support
- outstanding support from the Alpha Five development team
- low cost of the development platform and a multitude of training and educational videos
During my career I have worked in a number of development platforms and I can say without hesitation that the systems we have built with Alpha Five are ridiculously reliable when compared with any of them. And when it comes to business systems, stability and reliability mean everything. When we implement a new Alpha Five based system for a client we find that there are fewer "bugs" and an increased level of stability. I attribute this to the following factors:
- using the component "builders" to do much of the creation of the components reduces the number of programmer errors introduced into the application
- utilizing the Tabbed User Interface (TUI) as a launching point for the components provides a great user interface without web-pages, navigation components, and hand-tooled security coding.
- recognizing and adhering to the back-end data source's rules helps to maintain extremely high levels of data integrity.
In conclusion, if you're evaluating Alpha Five v11 as your development platform, do factor in system stability and reliability into your return on investment. If you're not fixing bugs and fixing data, you can develop more systems!
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