[NewDesigner]

I'm a recent convert too. Well sort of. I'm using both but slowly starting to prefer the mac for more and more.This is off the topic of Alpha 5 but I wanted to suggest for everyone to keep an open mind about macs. It's like this: MAC vs PC is like Hatfield vs McCoy. HOWEVER if you are 20 something and your name is Hatfield and your neighbor is named McCoy and very attractive you may consider converting. Even if you are 50 something you may cross the line, you just don't admit it in public.MAC's and PC's are both good. They are different but good and I'm starting to prefer MAC's.Anyone who wants to dabble with MAC's should get The Missing Manuel Swithcing to the MAC. Without it you can function but this book wil remove lots of ambiguity.Did you notice that there are few anti-virus products available for mac's? Guess why. There is little market for it. Guess why.........I'm still hoping for advice about getting involved with database work. If anyone wants to respond I would appreciate it. (see my post above)Thanks,Bob

[Bremkamp]

Since you asked for advice, here's my 2 cents....Should you get involved with databases? Can't answer if you should, but if you decide to, and if this list of responses convinces you to try Alpha, then jump in! At worst you lose is a little time. At best you have a new career!Alpha has a free 30 day trial. That's plenty of time to evaluate it. There are a number of sample templates available to get you started, and version 2 of their full fledged ecommerce package will soon be released if you want to use a "canned" but customizable solution.Most important is the message board. This is a community of developeres who are amazingly willing to share and help each other. Questions are typically answered in hours. By the way, one of the people on the board is a photographer who has created an ecommerce package to sell his photographs.

[filesmith]

To help clarify for "mronck" re "If the posting of filesmith is just to state Filemaker has those options and Alpha would not have, it is simply incorrect." -- the original Reviewer had already pointed out that Alpha Five has those features but did not mention that FileMaker also has those features. I was just setting that record straight.

[bheckard]

Alpha Five is not cross-platform, which makes is useless for my company.

[taylorsharpe]

I went through and read all of the other comments. I do not use Alpha 5, but do use FileMaker. FileMaker is a great product with easy to learn curve. Most of the comments people have made are about the greater scalability of Alpha 5. That is true from a developers perspective. But for the average staff around my office, we need really simple and FileMaker is that solution.
I really would not be comparing Alpha 5 to FileMaker, but instead to Servoy, Oracle, etc. If the staff here need more power than FileMaker, we are probably going to do it on our Oracle servers and use contractors to design it. If you need something between FileMaker and Oracle, I bet Alpha 5 is a good choice. But I'd be more interested in a comparison between Alpha 5 and Servoy.

[LondonDeveloper]

I'll own up. I make my living creating solutions with FileMaker and have done for over a decade. I'll also own up that I've yet to try Alpha Five. To now I'd not even heard of it. My bad.

And of course all this is bound to slant my take on all this, for the time being at least. But there's been more than a little bias showing in almost every response so far, so perhaps that's fair. Maybe its time someone mentioned that FileMaker is an astonishing product.

Out of the box even a technophobe can create a seriously useful database, which makes it a great choice for individuals and small businesses.

Whilst, in the hands of an experienced developer who's prepared to delve deeper and learn more advanced stuff, it is possible to build self contained applications that can do more or less anything. Its scaleable, networkable, cross platform and amazingly flexible. Add the extra power brought in with hundreds of plug-ins as well as the web viewer, which makes integration of almost any web technology possible, to say nothing of ESS and you have something that can literally run corporations.

So there are really two products. One for the gifted amateur and another, (100% compatible because its actually the same thing), for the serious developer. And that's part of FileMaker's extraordinary success. It can and does grow with the developer's knowledge and experience. So ordinary mortals don't have to read every book and every manual, learning complex principles and syntax before they can begin to create anything. But with a gentle learning curve at the start, many persist cheerfully and its not rare for them to become qualified geeks before too very long. I should know, I'm one of them.

And because of this, a good proportion of FileMaker Pro solutions are built, not by programmers who may have little real world business experience and little knowledge of real world user needs and interface, but crafted by real humans for real humans. (Which is not to say that the best of us can't programme seriously in all kinds of languages and environments). We're talking bespoke at its best. And you might be very surprised by the actual solutions that have been and are created using FileMaker. Many compete happily with the very best of the best and a good many Fortune 500 companies use FileMaker.

I'd say you might well benefit from a deeper look.

[rupertmaxwell1]

Interesting thread.



We are evaluating Alpha Five vs Filemaker and other choices at the company I work for extensively for the last 6 months

We have concluded that Alpha Five is the way to go because of
* much stronger capabilities to produce web applications (with security, reporting and ajax)
* much stronger support for building apps against SQL databases
* much more extensive programmability
* better reporting
* an impressive security framework
In terms of "ease of use" they were on a par when we tested with groups of workers at all levels in our company.

I did notice, that Alpha now offers new customers 6 hours of webinar training at no charge.

I also recently came across this comparison site that has been created by the company http://www.alphafive...maker/index.asp

Also Justin James - who writes the development blog at Tech Republic just reviewed Alpha Five at http://blogs.techrep...elopment/?p=679

[willbown]

Yes, this is an interesting thread, and now much more useful than the original article. To sum up: Alpha Five is much more powerful than Filemaker, but often in ways that are not obvious or useful to people who aren't professional developers. For example, many people making a database solution don't need to support hundreds of concurrent users, need SQL or need a fully browser-based solution. So I have a new question to ask this thread.

Some projects will have heavyweight requirements that make something like Alpha Five necessary. But let's consider a project in the grey area that could reasonably be tackled by either package. My question is: As a development environment, which is actually easier to develop in, both in terms of learning how to use the environment, and then using it :

Filemaker

Alpha Five

Servoy?

My opinion is that Servoy is definitely more difficult to learn (and then use) than Filemaker, but I haven't tried Alpha Five.

[tulsiram]

In my openion both are super hero for the use of user Level.FileMaker is easy to learn and one can start within minutes to use database.So for beginners

who want to know and learn basic of database and relational database this is for them.Where as Alpha has more advance feature which is for Advanced developer.It takes some time to learn relational database.In connection to server FileMaker is also easy to start with its limited feature and Alpha takes time to configuration.Price of FileMaker is cheap in comparision to Alpha software.

One major difference is FileMaker is for Two Platform window and Mac.More platform more customer for developers. Alpha is only based Window Platform so it has limited customer for developers.