Awareim versus Alpha5

noahfreed

I'm looking to migrate away from Filemaker and I am evaluating these two products anyone have experience with both that can give me their opinion??

thnx

michaelappdev

My company very recently started making the migration from FileMaker Pro to Aware IM. We reviewed Alpha Five and a few others that claimed Rapid Application Development. There are quite a few solutions that allow you to deploy rich apps via Java thin client but only Aware IM allows us to deploy applications 100% through the web. Side by side, Aware IM turns out to be a much better alternative to FileMaker than any of its competitors. We liked the layout flexibility of FileMaker but we don't miss that much since Aware IM's feature set combined with EXT JS makes for a very smooth and intuitive UI for our end users.

Developing is a breeze. We are able to roll out first versions of apps in days, not weeks. Alpha five developing is not fun.

We spent 6 months reviewing other products and we are so glad that we moved to Aware IM.

noahfreed

the people on the ALpha 5 site seem to think alpha five has more flexibility and power than awareim . they Aware Im doesn't allow as much customization but Im not sure why.

tford

Hmm. I wonder why they would say that??

Are there specific questions you have?

NBDAB

We had used Alpha5 almost one year ago and it was far benoth our standards in terms of Time VS Cost VS Quality (delivered code/app)

Alpha5 was great tool for someone who wanted to dig into coding more than process orented development. We consider them equal to a http://www.bungeeconnect.com/ or a Wolf Frameworks type RAD

Thoughts which came to mind are: Home Grown, Less Commerical, More Coding

noahfreed

They claim the new version 10 offers codeless Ajax development, the itnerface seems a bit complex though

NBDAB

Well as I mentioned we did review it almost one year ago but found that it did not meet our needs. If could be completely different now. Let us know if you do test it in comparison.

himanshu

Hi,

I don't know much about the software above were all discussing (Alpha 5), but would like to add some that before choosing AwareIM I gone through many such application which should take my application and development in right direction.

AwareIM has a very solid base and framework(MVC) which is best in the market and if i see they have very better future as the updates are coming. And with that all users are benefited.

Thanks,

aware_support

Aware IM offers codeless AJAX development since version 4.0. All the automatic UI that you see is driven by AJAX. You don't need to write a single piece of code for this. All sample applications have been created without writing a single piece of code.

On some other thread about AJAX programming you seemed to think that you need to code to support AJAX. YOU DON"T. It's only for those people that want to replace Aware IM automatic UI with a completely different custom UI, do you need to write AJAX code.

blackwellm

Alpha5 is quite acceptable for internal lan-based development but you will soon find its shortcomings (try accessing a web service or connecting to some odbc data sources). Bungeeconnect does not look like it's getting out of beta any time soon.

IMHO, AwareIM works well in the ISV arena (that is, selling to single companies at a time as bespoke projects) but does not address the SaaS market as well as it could due to it's licensing model.