Alpha Software has announced Alpha Anywhere, the first complete environment for rapid development and deployment of robust business applications for mobile devices and personal computers, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, ultrabooks and touch-enabled computers.
Alpha Anywhere is a standards-based environment that dramatically reduces the cost, time and complexity of developing and deploying industrial strength business applications for today’s mobile and personal computing era. These applications can take advantage of hardware-specific features and support all display sizes on all platforms.
Developers with a wide range of skills can build business applications with Alpha Anywhere. Complete applications can be rapidly assembled using Alpha Anywhere’s rich set of simple, intuitive, standards-based components that allow extensive customisation.
Developers also can build their own objects, methods, components and event handlers by coding in standard programming languages on the client or server side of an application.
The efficient and timely acquisition of mobile skills is critical for developers to stay current, and Alpha Anywhere is the fastest way to gain proficiency and become productive in mobile and touch computing.
With Alpha Anywhere, IT organisations, systems integrators and custom software developers can take advantage of existing development skills to build and deploy new mobile applications or mobile-enable existing applications. Developers who have used Microsoft Access, Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, FoxPro, Delphi and similar environments will feel right at home with Alpha Anywhere.
“Mobile capability is becoming a crucial requirement for business applications, and Alpha Anywhere has removed the barriers to cost-effectively create and deploy them,” says Richard Rabins, Alpha Software CEO. “But, mobile doesn’t exist in a vacuum. With personal computers and laptops continuing to play an important role in business, and with the growth of and Chromebooks, applications must run on and be optimised for all mobile and personal computer platforms. Alpha Anywhere addresses these needs.”
Developers using Alpha Anywhere can build complete business applications utilising HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript components.
If an authentic mobile application is required, Alpha Anywhere supports Cordova/PhoneGap to take full advantage of authentic platform features, such as the camera, media capture, authentic notifications, network status, local file system, and the accelerometer. Alpha is adding custom plug-ins including bar code scanning, credit card reading/processing, audio recording with compression and SMS.
Highlights of the product include:
* Client and server – one environment to develop all three tiers of a business application: user experience, business logic and database access;
* Mobile devices and PC – applications written once will run anywhere;
* Standards-based, open and extensible – utilising HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript;
* Wide and deep functionality – enterprise reporting, charting, mapping, video, images, sound, scheduling, geography and geospatial functionality, security and more, all easily incorporated into applications;
* Powerful connectivity – connects to data from all major SQL databases, stored procedures and Web services;
* Touch UX – supports touch-enabled user experiences on screens from 4-inches to four feet; and
* Flexible, scalable deployment – applications can be self-hosted, hosted by third-party ISPs and cloud services, or the AlphaCloud, when it is released.
“Mobile makes the developer’s job much harder. End-users expect a myriad of task-specific applications on short notice, all tuned to a highly productive touch-and-swipe interface that is tremendously challenging for developers,” says Dan Bricklin, chief technology officer at Alpha Software.
“At the same time, users require full power on the desktop for heavy duty data analysis, data entry, and to view reports on large screen monitors controlled by a keyboard and mouse. Alpha Anywhere empowers developers to meet these expectations.”
Alpha Anywhere combines full mobile capabilities with core technology from Alpha Five, an environment in which tens of thousands of industrial strength business applications have been built. This assures developers Alpha Anywhere has the maturity, maintainability, scalability and security needed to create and deploy feature-rich applications for mobile devices and personal computers.
“We are excited to be partnering with Alpha, to bring Alpha Anywhere to the Southern African market. It uniquely meets a critical need for developers who have to rapidly build powerful data-driven business applications that run on all modern smart phones and personal computers,” says director Ronald Woolf of Intersoft Computer books, Publishing & Distribution.
“We have entered the post PC era and there are enormous opportunities for developers in our region using Alpha Anywhere to take advantage of this fundamental shift in computing.”
Alpha Anywhere is available immediately. A 30-day free trial is also available.
