Alpha Five: Easy enough for a novice, but powerful enough for a pro

I could have titled this blog post, "Custom coding for Ajax callbacks." But I think this post is about more than JavaScript and a HTML markup. It's about negating the age-old argument that, when it comes to development platforms, one size can't fit all.

How many times have you heard that certain languages and platforms are good for advanced developers, while others are good for novices? I suppose that's true for some other RAD tools, but one of the unique things about Alpha Five is that it's been engineered from day one to be easy enough for beginners to get started with, but powerful, strong, and extensible enough for professionals to use everyday.

We just spoke with a customer who told us how fast his junior developers caught onto Alpha Five. Now let me give you the other side of the story, which is about some tough questions that a seasoned developer threw at us, and how we helped him accomplish his tasks using the exact same platform, Alpha Five Version 11, that the novices found so easy to use.

John Landry is the former CTO and Senior Technology VP at Lotus Development and a former VP of Technology Strategy at IBM after they were acquired by IBM. He's also a developer, and was trying to execute code in script tags on an Ajax callback in Alpha Five Version 11. He contacted Selwyn, and we took to the screen to create a comprehensive video tutorial, just like our Alpha Five Version 11 feature peeks, to help him solve the problem.

John was building a content management system, the contents of which were stored in a SQL database, and displaying the content using the grid component.

As you might know, a typical field of data in the SQL database contains HTML markup. But with John's project, there was a critical additional piece of information: There were script tags that contained Javascript within the HTML markup.

By setting the appropriate filters and then opening the grid on an Ajax callback, the page was able to show dynamic content stored in the database. However, even though the HTML content stored in the database was being shown, the code in the script tags was not being executed. So we told John that the reason for this was that the code in the script tags was being ignored on an Ajax callback.

Got all that? Take a look now at the video below to see the solution that worked for John. Hint: it only took one line of jQuery code.

John's experience is the perfect example of how Version 11 provides productivity for your development team, but won't hold you back when it's time for some serious coding. John was able to sink his teeth into this like Clifton into a bone, and we were happy to hear that both the project, and John's appetite for code, were satisfied!