Alpha Software: Because writing code from scratch once is enough
Last week we demoed the as-yet-pre-beta Alpha Five Version 10 for Tech Republic's Justin James. Justin seemed to like what he saw. But he also brought up a constant concern he hears from developers, which is what we call the "anyone but Microsoft" problem.
What this means is developers are comfortable committing to platforms such as Microsoft's, Sun's, or Oracle's, etc., because they believe -- in our view, incorrectly -- that these are a safe bet, because they are provided by the big guys. And that means, in developers' minds, that they will not be making a commitment to a platform that will lock them in or abandon them.
Add to that the fact that Alpha can be viewed by developers as a "proprietary" platform, because it's an all-in-one solution that you build, debug, and deploy in. (Forget the fact, for a moment, that all commercial platforms can be deemed proprietary.)
Fortunately, we have what we think is a rational answer to this conundrum, which we shared with Justin. It starts with this argument: We've been around for over two decades, and our developers have never been in a situation where they couldn't upgrade from one version to the next, or had to write their code from scratch because we made their version obsolete.
Compare that to Microsoft, for example, which over the past few years forced its Visual Basic and Visual FoxPro developers to throw out 100 percent of their code, and rewrite their apps from scratch, in order to take advantage of a newer platform.
Microsoft isn't the first dev tools company that's done this. It won't be the last. It happens again and again in our industry. In fact, we wrote a white paper on the topic to counter the flawed notion that you don't get fired for buying Microsoft (or some other big player's appdev platform).
The demo with Justin reminded me that it's probably a good time to bring the white paper to the forefront again. I encourage anyone who's concerned about Alpha being a proprietary platform to take a few minutes and review it.
3 comments:
Alpha does not need to compare itselves to the Oracle's, Sun and Microsoft's. Alpha is filling a niche on its own: It's a tool which fills in the gaps the before mentioned before did not manage to fill at this moment...Alpha just have to make sure they will continue to fill the gaps and shortcomings and live aside the big names adding value. Don't compete, just add value where they have shortcomings...
Try to be a 4gl tool on top of there still 3gl tools. Concentrate on ease of use and connectivity. Adding value instead of creating an alternative. Understand the niche you have and stay 3 steps ahead. So: get Ajax functionality in there easy for dummies, object oriented development apart from data driven and elevate on ease of use.
i think .net and visual studio are big steps backwards for consultants/developers/etc. more like 2gl's. oracle tools? do such things exist? you must be a masochist to use any oracle devtool. sun, java, etc.? oop goop. if you want x-platform, go with flash or html or ajax, not java.....unless you want slug-slow apps that blow up on internet explorer. i use alpha because it gets the job done with a minimum of fuss. i have been building databases with alpha for many many years and i have never had a problem moving from an old version to a new version. when the web came along, alpha added it. ajax came along, alpha added it. css came along, alpha added it. anyone who thinks microsoft is a smart way to go needs to go back to school and do their homework. download alpha, watch the training videos, build a web app,and you'll never go back to microsoft again.
"So: get Ajax functionality in there easy for dummies, object oriented development apart from data driven and elevate on ease of use."
We agree - and hear you loud and clear:)
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