Alpha Software

General Programming
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Another product I was kicking the tires on before Xojo was Alpha Software, which is another Basic dialect (XBasic) that seems to be sucking up more to corporate users in the low-code space. Alpha Anywhere is their mature product for devs but they seem to have retargeted it to IOS and Android, and web; I’m not sure it even does desktop anymore. Alpha Transform is the dumbed-down low-code version, which they are marketing as a form automation platform.

I’m curious if anyone has experience with them. I rejected them because of cost (there’s a free / community tier to get you hooked but their cheapest paid tier is $100/mo, though it does include hosting; production apps probably need higher tiers), because they don’t do desktop targets, and secondarily because their desktop development environment is windows-only.

They have an upcoming virtual 4 day developer’s conference starting this coming Wednesday but they want $600 for it.

I’m toying with buying a Windows OS license and checking the product out at least. Anyone else had a look?

Product page:

Their DevCon:

ETA: Looking at their sales video they seem to suggest the apps can be deployed on desktop but I think it may be that they are using something like Electron under the hood and everything is really just a web app in disguise. Not sure. Also, the video claims you can use Java, C#, VB.NET, JScript (I’m sure they mean JavaScript) or C++ so maybe they have ditched XBasic. This is reminiscent of how Lianja, another one of my tire-kicking efforts, lets you use LianjaScript (FoxPro), PHP, JavaScript, Python or (soon) C#.

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It is still what Xojo is: an real expensive tool with low abilities and strongly reduced functionality compared with CodenameOne for example. I would not choose a small platform like that. Open Sourced Software has much more security.

1 Like
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Xojo is at least beta software :wink:

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Yeah I do not love the idea of being tied to their cloud for everything either.

I have no actual idea how limited its capabilities are, and not sure I want to find out.

Do you use CodenameOne as your primary toolchain then?

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Oh I think Alpha has been around a good 20 years or so. I bumped into it off and on over that period. It has just evolved in ways Xojo has not. Not necessarily saying they are good ways, but I’m guessing they have more then 30 people at their DevCon, lol.

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I use java as Tollchain, java swing for Desktop, codenameone for iOS and Android and vaadin for web. All open source, ide I use is netbeans mostly.