As an experienced developer I beg to differ with some of the arguments and the conclusion as well. I would place Alpha Five above Filemaker at any time. One of the strenghts of Alpha Five is, that it can serve users from one employee companies untill billion dollar companies. There is as much detail available in terms of scripting possibilities and functions as you like at any given time. It is obvious that from the surface one could conclude this looks less intuitive. Truth is, the options are amazing and all at your finger tips. What I definitely missed is the customer awareness of Alpha's Support Team which more the incidentally brings a solution to a problem encountered within the very same day. Usability is more then being intuitive only. My conclusion is, that if you want to play choose something else, if you want to get the job done quickly, choose Alpha. As far as Filemaker is concerned, the advantage of SQL access is overated. It is limited.

I looked at both about four years ago while looking for a development platform for a specific project and went on to develop a software consulting business after that project was complete. I looked at FMPro9 just now to get reacquainted. I chose Alpha Five over FMPro back then and still would (admittedly I am biased now, but my reasons are solid). FMPro may appear more intuitive* if you just open up a template and start doing data-entry*, but Alpha wins by a wide margin if you actually want to build an application for your business.

• I mean I really do like their nifty slide bar and page-turning book image record navigation, which give it its intuitiveness, but they are not that important in the larger view of things.

Templates, you quickly find, are completely useless when it comes to actually building something that fits your business needs. They dont even help you get started. What they do is lull you in to believing building what you need is going to be a piece of cake. All of the FMPro templates are simple one-table, one-form flat data-entry screens, useless. Even though I dont give much credence to templates, the ones that Alpha provides are full applications with multiple screens, menus, etc. The kind of well-rounded thing you will actually have to create if you build an application for your business.

I was interested to see if FMPro had improved their web capabilities (thats what I was looking for when I found Alpha), but I see you still really cannot create true web applications. You share your desktop application screen with others through the Internet. That may be intuitive and a quickie solution for some applications, but I cant see it working well for anything complex. Or (and I did not spend much time learning this so I dont really understand) you link to a site already written in PHP. Scripting languages like PHP is what everyone is trying to avoid by coming to products like FMPro and Alpha.

Id have to see a really decent sized application written in FMPro to do a real comparison, but based on what I have been able to build (both Desktop and full Web Applications), I really like Alpha Five. If you check it out, be sure to look at Action Scripting, SQL Reporting, Web Projects and Xbasic. Also check out the basic layout when building desktop and web pages, very neat and intuitive design, everything at your fingertips. I guess I am trying to say that Alpha is intuitive where it counts, deep down inside where you will be spending lots and lots of time putting together something worthwhile and making it work.

{color:red}Where did my post go...{color}
Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 4:39 am

The moderator used censorial privileges and deleted my reply. Did I write anything objectionable or...???

Kellie, thank you for responding!

I re-quote my reply posted today at 4:39 AM

{color:darkblue}*Becky Waring write-up is at best mediocre who evidently has not even scratched Alphas surface! Its like comparing QuickBooks to Microsofts Dynamics (formerly Great Plains)!

What else could I write in 1,000 characters?*{color}

The writer certainly did their best to compare the two, however, I am not sure if they fully understand what someone can do with Alpha, I compared both and do all my development with ALPHA and there certainly is no comparison between the two.

I would compare them in the following way: if you wanted to move a ton of bricks, would you use a Pick-Up Truck or a Tonka Toy? --- Both certainly look like trucks but only Alpha has the power of a Pick-Up Truck.

ALPHA is a powerful development environment that simply allows anyone to develop applications from the simplest to extremely robust without any limitations.

Alpha Five's web capabilities BLOW AWAY Filemaker's.

Filemaker's web publishing restricts you to their look and feel which in most cases is undesirable.

With Alpha Five you can do anything that you can do in other languages like ASP, PHP, etc. and it will take you significantly less time to build a bulletproof, secure web application. Also, if you want to integrate Flash, ActiveX, etc, no problem. Want your own specific look and feel , no problem.

It's key to note that Alpha Five's web development environment sets a new worldwide standard for ease of development. It's actually fun to work with. It encourages experimentation and is the most intuitive web development environment I've seen to date. It's truly an order of magnitude above every other web development environment I've worked with.

If your plans include scaling your database application to the web then I highly encourage you and your team to take a serious look at Alpha Five.

From the comments of the reviewer, it appears to me that she does not really understand the significant differences between Alpha Five and Filemaker. When I looked at Filemaker three years ago, I realized that its design does not inherently separate application from data, and it lacks an underlying development tool comparable to Alpha Five's Xbasic. While templates may be adequate for a simple applications, serious commercial applications require the ability to customize the presentation of the data to meet the needs of the user. Applications that are to be deployed and maintained over multiple sites require clear segregation of code and data, and the ability to programatically update the code without exports and imports. As a serious development tool, I think Alpha Five is a demonstrably superior product. -- R. James