I’ve just arrived home from attending the Alpha Five Developers' Conference, put on by long-time Alpha developer and hardware guru, Ira Perlow.  I got back, but haven’t come down yet.  It was a very good conference, better I felt, than last years, but that may have to do with the longer time frame, this year being a three-day conference as opposed to a two day conference last year.  

The Alpha users' group is truly a unique community, populated by gracious and knowledgeable people, and many were in attendance at this year’s conference.  Tom Cone was presented with a plaque of appreciation by the Alpha user community for his tireless help to other Alpha users on the message board, although how the board got along without him during the conference I’ll never know.  Especially appreciated at the conference was the large contingent from Alpha Software Incorporated.   I’d constantly see the Alpha developers trapped by an individual or small group, graciously giving information on some aspect or other of Alpha Five.  The food was very good, the hours went long into the evening.  Selwyn and Richard Rabins, co-founders of Alpha Software Incorporated, were in attendance until the very end of the conference.  

Selwyn Rabins tirelessly gave four one- to two-hour presentations on some of the new features of version 5¹.  The “What’s New in Version Five" document and the release notes for the current build version, together total 155 pages describing the new features in version 5, and this is not complete! As the conference went on I found myself trying to comprehend the length and breadth of the new capabilities we are being given in version 5.  It is truly astounding.  You may accuse me of being an Alphaholic and entirely biased in my viewpoint, but I’ve got to say it anyway, this product is the most astounding piece of software I have ever seen.  The power it presents to even the casual user is amazing.  I found myself thinking, as I watched presentation after presentation, that this new version was going to make me obsolete.  Routines that in the past required Xbasic coding can now be accomplished by any reasonably competent Alpha Five user.  Of course, a good developer’s skills will not be obsolete, but the bar will be raised.  I kept trying to come up with a list of my favorite new features, but the list would be so long, it would appear to be a treatise.  Go to the Alpha Software web site at www.alphasoftware.com to see a partial list of the new features.  Even a highlight list would be too long to print here.  

Here is the news, as I see it from the Alpha Five Developers conference:

Selwyn Rabins announced that Alpha Software Incorporated is targeting June 2002 as the release date for Alpha Five version 5.  Selwyn said that much of what remains to be completed is work on the documentation.  As you know, we have been expecting version 5 for some time now, but I got the definite impression that this date would not be missed by far.  Selwyn addressed the issue that many still feel that Alpha Four is an easier product to use than Alpha Five.  He said they have put much time and effort into making Alpha Five version 5 an easy product to use.  It appears to me that they have achieved this.  It must be acknowledged that the Windows environment is a much richer and inherently more complex interface than the DOS environment, but in my opinion, this is begging the point.  In Alpha Five version 5, we are given so much more capability, that it is pointless to try to compare it to Alpha Four.  You could build a new house with a handsaw, hammer and nails, but would you really want to? However, what about a modern steel high-rise? As much as I loved Alpha Four, that is how I see the differences between these two products.  

An interesting insight into the creation of version 5 was given to us by Selwyn.  Most of the new features of version 5 have been created via the new enhanced Xbasic and Xdialog.  Xdialog, a superset of the Xbasic language, was initially created as a rapid development tool for the Alpha Software developers to create user-interface components.  It turned out to be so successful, Alpha Software decided to expose it to end-users.  With the maturation of the Xbasic language comes the ability to rapidly configure, modify, and extend Alpha Five itself, much faster than is possible using a lower-level language such as C.  

Selwyn also announced that a web-enabled version of Alpha Five version 5 would be shipping within a reasonably short time after the release of version 5!  This version will contain its own web server, and enable the creation of a default HTML form for any table or set in the database.  This HTML form will have the capability to view, enter, modify, and query records.  The default HTML form can be modified by any HTML editor in terms of the aesthetics of the lay out.  Server side Xbasic can be embedded in the layout to deliver data to a browser.  Xbasic can also be used to create HTML web pages from scratch ‘on the fly’ so to speak!  

This announcement caught me by surprise.  Of course we all hoped that web integration with our database applications would be coming soon, but I didn’t expect this type of integration this soon after the release of version 5.  This is very good news for the entire Alpha community.

And the good news kept coming.  Selwyn also announced that they anticipated that an ADO (ActiveX Data Objects, Microsoft’s latest database connectivity technology that replaces ODBC) client version of Alpha Five would be available approximately one year after the release of version 5.  This also caught me totally by surprise! It had been announced at last year’s convention that Alpha Software was working on a client-server version of Alpha Five.  As Alpha Five uses the Codebase database engine, and as Codebase has a client-server version of their dbf file format engine, I assumed that the client-server version of Alpha Five would be based on this.  It is not, and this is very good news indeed.  By making the decision to go with ADO technology, Alpha Five will be able to access virtually any backend database server that is ADO compliant! This means Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, Sybase, you name it! This is not just good news, this is astoundingly good news for Alpha Five users and developers.  

Let’s step back a second and view these three versions of Alpha Five in perspective.  If you need a desktop database in a stand-alone computer or small peer-to-peer network, then Alpha Five version 5 is the rapid and powerful application development environment to use.  Need to scale up to a larger network with a dedicated file server? Then, again, you have Alpha Five version 5 (in an upcoming issue we will do an extensive interview of a 300-node computer network running Alpha Five as their only database environment).  Need to server your data via a thin client connection (browser) over an Intranet or the Internet? Just serve your current database to the browser via Alpha Five version 5 web-enabled version.  Need to connect to a large enterprise-level database server? Use the ADO client version of Alpha Five version 5.  I need to stress here that all your skills with Alpha Five, all the Xbasic or new Scripting Genie skills will carry through in all these environments.  

If this isn’t enough to get you excited, it is time to have someone check your pulse.  Is this all vaporware? Alpha Software handed out, to every attendee at the conference, the current late beta version of Alpha Five version 5.  Many beta testers around the country have been using the beta version for some time now, so we know this isn’t vaporware.  The web version? Inside sources tell me it is on track and on time.  The ADO version? It is still a ways off in the future.  Am I an Alphaholic? You bet I am, and if you aren’t, you better get started.  Ira put on a great conference, Alpha Software extensively demonstrated a great new version of Alpha Five, and maybe more importantly, we were given a glimpse of the future strategy of Alpha Software Incorporated, in reality the same strategy it has always had, to empower the everyday real-world Alpha user in ways that the huge monolithic database shrines have never envisioned, from the grassroots up, the Alpha way.  Can you tell I’m excited?

¹Remember that the cost to purchase or upgrade to Alpha Five version 4.5 will be fully credited against the cost to purchase or upgrade to the new Alpha Five version 5!
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