ALP 1.1 adds many amazing features
and makes ALP a complete set of components that gives the developer abilities to
build in ASP wide range desktop applications. Yes exactly - desktop
applications in ASP (Active Server Pages) in combination with DHTML and the
extensions to it provided by ALPFrame viewer makes ASP technology a competing
technology to such popular environments like Delphi and VB. ALP has minimum
requirements and runs on all the PC versions of Windows - from Windows 95! ASP
allows you to build once and deploy to desktops and the WEB server (IIS/PWS and
some others) without
changing even a line of code while the desktop oriented RAD environments do not.
You can use: databases through ADO, thousands of third party ActiveX
components, port existing WEB applications for minutes, build business and other
applications for the final users in the easiest and still powerful language
VBScript, you can use JScript or PerlScript as well. ALP requires one purchase
of a developer license ($600) and you can develop and sell as many applications
as needed with it, you can install it on as many workstations as you need. Or you can avoid spending money on ALP and tell the users to
install ALP and buy ALP license for their machines ($15 or less if more licenses
are bought in a pack). So, there is a suitable and affordable way to use ALP for
both sole developers and companies.
ALP comes with installer you can use with your applications (no need to buy
another), a viewer that extends the Internet Explorer with features typical for
the desktop applications - window and context menus. The same viewer allows also
certain autorun applications to be built in ASP E.g. autorun CDs with live ASP
content!
Of course the WEB developers should need to pay attention to the requirements
of their applications and redistribute any 3-d party component they use, but
this is true for any desktop oriented development environment as well. So nothing
special is needed - your WEB development skills are applicable for desktop
development.
Many users ask why not ASP.NET? We will include such support in near future
as an option, but note that .NET is an entire subsystem - an engine which must
be installed in order to run ASP.NET. It also does not support Windows 95. This could be problem on some of the first
Windows platforms and will require huge amount of redistributtable files. This
makes the autorun CDs in ASP.NET almost impossible on the older platforms and we
will need to wait years to say that most PCs have .NET pre-installed. At the
other hand ASP requires only Internet explorer 4.0 or later and the ALP engine.
Internet explorer is installed on almost any available Windows PC, minimum ALP
redistributtable size is about 500-700k (sipped) so the rest is your application and as long
as it depends only on ALP core components it will be able to start even without
need to perform installation (and perhaps requiring the user to log on as an
administrator). The bundled components (ActiveX pack1) cover very wide range of
system and utility functions so the application has tools for the most
non-network tasks it may need.
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