Alpha Anywhere Enhancements

Xbasic

Here is a sampling of the Xbasic-related capabilities within Alpha Anywhere:

• Send email using the SparkPost service. This is a much more reliable way of sending email from your Alpha Anywhere app than using your own mail servers.

• New array methods

  • .push() -- push an element onto the end of an array

  • DIM arrays with default values

  • reversearray() -- reverse array entries

• JSON has emerged as the de-facto standard for data transfer. Xbasic now has a huge library of functions for working with and generating JSON data. These functions make JSON a first class citizen in your Xbasic code and make it very easy to work with JSON data.

• a5_json_to_excel() - export JSON data to Excel.

• Xbasic function can now take array arguments and can return arrays.

• Helper functions for working with SQL tables - e.g. sql_import(), sql_update(), sql_insert(), create_sql_table(). These functions make it easier to do insert/update operations against SQL databases than writing low level Xbasic code.

• Node.js has emerged as a extremely important language. The public Node repositories have thousands of Node modules to perform specialized tasks. Xbasic can now call functions written in Node.js using the Xbasic node_request() function.

• CURL to Xbasic Genie - REST APIs are extremely important for developers today. Many web sites make it possible to interact with them programmatically using REST API. For example, get the weather forecast by making a REST API call to a Weather service. The typical way in in which a developer will make a REST API call is using the popular CURL program. Additionally, most API documentation show CURL examples of how to make REST calls to their API. The Xbasic CURL genie will convert a CURL command into an Xbasic script so that you can use Xbasic to make REST API calls.

• Whatt3Words is a popular new service that translates addresses(specified by a latitude/longitude) into 3 simple English words. e.g. The address of Alpha's headquarters is smoke.eggs.strike. Alpha Anywhere now has built in functions to convert addressed into What3Words addresses and to convert What3Words addresses into lat/lng locations.

• QR Codes have become increasingly populate as a way of encoding information. You can now generate QR code from Xbasic. You can even include QR codes in printed reports.

• Send SMS messages directly from Xbasic using the Twillio service (twillio_send_sms() function)

• Merge data from a .dbf table or a SQL query into a Microsoft Word template documents

• Generate PDF files from any HTML text

• Xbasic classes -- more and more developers are using Xbasic classes when they write their Xbasic code. Classes can now define .get() and .set() methods that are called when you read and update properties in a class.

• While REST services have become more populate in recent years, there are still many enterprises that continue to use SOAP services. You can now use Xbasic to call SOAP services.

• Use the Xbasic a5_merge_json_into_template() function to use the full power of the Alpha templating features to generate documents by merging JSON data into templates.

• Read and write files to Amazon S3 buckets. S3 has emerged as a very popular 'hard drive in the cloud' and you can now use Xbasic function to read and write data from/to S3.