Alpha Software has partnered with Avanquest to announce the launch of Alpha Five Version 11, a rapid application development platform for business applications running on intranets, the Web, and web-enabled mobile devices. This new platform is being offered with an IDE, an object-oriented language, and a full client and server-side event model.
Alpha Five encourages a unified approach to information delivery over the Web, and its makers are vying to back up its position by offering new calendar-based scheduling support, geo-mapping capabilities, and video and image gallery components. Version 11 of Alpha Five also offers HTML reporting, gesture support for touch-driven devices, charting capabilities, and an open door policy welcoming the integration of .NET components.
"In these challenging economic times, it's all about delivering robust, agile applications to market quickly and efficiently. Alpha Five v11 lives up to its name as a rapid application development platform. This enables the client to feel more part of the process, as the developer is quickly able to respond to refinement requests, etc. Whilst there can be no substitute for a comprehensive specification, Alpha Five gives the developer the peace of mind that changes don't have to lead to the derailment of a project or budget," said the company, in a press statement.
Alpha Five V11 also includes Quick Report Genie and a new Layout Table report to allow the generation of reports in HTML and Excel. This also allows users to create linked reports, which are argued to be more useful than sub reports. Also included is an improved dialog component as a means of building custom web interfaces (instead of using a grid). The improved dialog component builder now supports repeating sections and optional Genie-assisted data binding.
To help with styling, v11 also introduces the CSS3 Style builder, which takes advantage of CSS3 features and includes component styles for building applications. In addition, it introduces extensive animation throughout the product to make it extremely quick and easy for a developer to add animation to an application. For desktop application developers, v11 offers the ability to use more web components on the desktop. Programmers can use tabbed UIs, page layouts, the new dialog component, and several other components in Desktop applications, not just grid components.
