Alpha Anywhere vs React

• Mobile application development with true offline capability.
• Low-code, rapid app development and deployment environment for building native-quality, cross platform web and mobile business applications.
• Cross platform mobile apps created with HTML5.
• Back-end database support for pretty much all the most popular SQL backends as well as NoSQL and Rest APIs.

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• React is designed around the notion of generated html as opposed to templated html. This provides more flexibility in building elements on a page, and allows developers to create html that is programmatically configured based on runtime considerations.
• React uses JSX, which is HTML templating integrated into javascript code. This simplifies the generation of complex structures, especially those that vary based on runtime and interactive data.
• React is more efficient because it generates a virtual DOM rather than directly building in in the actual DOM. By building 'offline' in this manner, the DOM generation is faster. After building, it can be installed in one operation.
• React only builds those portions of the display that have changed, making display updates more efficient.

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• Whenever I'm asked to criticize Alpha Anywhere, my first comment refers to the documentation. For sure, they've made some improvements, this year, but I still wish it were better. Because I moved from another development package, I really had to start learning from scratch... I've been at it, for years, and I still feel like I have a way to go. The good news is that Alpha has a very active Message Board and there are lots of people who generously give their time to answer questions and help solve problems. There's no "tech support" line to call for help. Alpha DOES offer a paid "mentoring" service, which I used, several times. Unfortunately, my experience with the mentors wasn't as positive as I hoped it would be.
• Alpha needs to improve its "templates" to make them more modern for users. I've never had a complaint from users, but I'd like my applications to have a newer, flashier look.
• Alpha advertises itself as "codeless" programming. It is! You can certainly develop an entire application without writing a single line of "code." Unfortunately, that application will be pretty basic. If you're a serious developer, you'll want to learn "javascript" and "XBasic"... it'll come in very handy, as will an understanding about how to create SQL views and queries (and, Stored Procedures), etc.

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• React could get very frustrating unless you start thinking in React. React enforces a top down hierarchy of data flow and offers no way for the data to communicate backwards. This is a big shift in mindset coming from Angular 1.x. This constraint is really a big factor that determines how to organize your code and how you might want to write your own Components.
• Because of the self imposed top down hierarchy, you end up having a heavy parents with dumb children. Because parents would need to the bulk of the work, they usually manage the state, while passing callbacks to the child components. If not properly designed, this could lead to the callback hell, where you could have callbacks passing through like multiple children.
• As with any library, you will have to iterate through multiple designs to come up with a ways to avoid "heavy parent components" in React. One obvious solution is using some open source tools like Redux, but we opted for a variation of it to suit our needs.

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• Alpha is our sole Development Platform. It has enabled us to contract for some pretty large jobs. AND, we are regularly told, by our customers, that our programs have helped them improve their organizations, workflows and profits.

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• React sped up the time to implement new features, providing much better code-reuse across the team
• React's excellent performance made it so new components ran faster in the browser
• Since React is so popular, it's been easy to recruit new developers to the team who already have a familiarity with the library

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