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Alpha's "secret sauce" applied to built-in PhoneGap integration

Richard Rabins
The current pre-release of Alpha Anywhere has PhoneGap integration built in. We received these comments (shown below) from David Kates (rune.dkates@rogers.com) an experienced developer who runs a well respected software  development company in Toronto, Ontario in Canada. (David has authored a number of blog posts.) We wanted to share the comments with you because, in many ways, they encapsulate the "secret sauce" of Alpha Anywhere - namely the ability of Alpha Anywhere to abstract what could otherwise be complicated and time consuming concepts and procedures into straight forward, understandable and highly productive choices in the Alpha Anywhere component system - which are the building blocks of  Alpha Anywhere. This in turn is the core to Alpha Anywhere's unique “Coding Optional” design  that provides the absolute flexibility and fine control of a code based development system but with development times that (according to customers,) are 5-10 times faster than code based approaches. Here are David's comments.
The Alpha/PhoneGap stuff is the difference between a small percentage of Alpha Anywhere users attempting to wrap their HTML5 applications in PhoneGap  and ALL Alpha users thinking that this is another very cool, easily understood, easily used, well integrated part of Alpha Anywhere. Now...anyone can create a PhoneGap Build app.  And the documentation couldn't be any clearer!  PhoneGap Build with all its config.xml, plugins, settings, and not easily understood differences between platforms is not for the faint of heart. It’s like a progression: 
  1. PhoneGap:  Not something I would probably succeed at.
  2. PhoneGap Build: With help I get it and I can work with it…but it’s tough slogging.
  3. Alpha Anywhere with PhoneGap Build integrated right in: As easy as working with any other aspect of Alpha Anywhere. Alpha Anywhere with PhoneGap Build integrated right in  is so easy to deal with that it’s not something you need to think about in order to proceed.
Great stuff… Bob Moore (Alpha's VP of Mobile Technology) has done an amazing job of shielding us from PhoneGap.
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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.

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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