I have been working for a few months with the beta releases. I am a
long term alpha user (back to 3).
I am working for Florida's largest on-line bookseller and am presently
developing a program in Alpha Five version 5 to replace the industry standard HomeBase which is put out by abebooks.com for booksellers.
THere are two other versions out there, but they have problems with
database sizes. We are presently up to 118,000 books in our database and increasing 2K per week.
All the people here had problems with the way HOmeBase worked, so I have
aleviated all those so far with version 5.
Only one aspect keeps me from moving immediately to Alpha, and that is
the ability to input an ISBN number into the form and have it return the
fields associated with the ISBN. HOmebase now goes back to ABEbooks and
does that as you enter records.
I have set the form to refer to our present database so that if the book
is a duplicate it does that for me, in addition to presenting a browse
with the past history of sales for that book to aid in pricing.
Other than that one problem the client is itching to switch. But I told
them that it will be a few months probably before I can get the program
to go out over the net and pull in the data from an ISBN database
somewhere.
If you would like for me to write a testimonial about how a5v5 is better
than v4 I would be glad to do so - I am a medium user, and don't like
having to resort to xbasic, so therefore I love v5 with all the scripts
and built in functions.
Ken Whitcomb