ALP exposes typical WEB programming interface (ASP, CGI etc.) but is not a WEB server. The programs for ALP run as desktop applications without need of WEB server or even network. It combines the desktop and WEB programming techniques in one.
ALP ships with installer you can use to deploy your applications as well. Also it comes with ALPFrame viewer which extends the IE DHTML object model and also allows autoruns to be built.
The run-time library packed with ALP is also known as newObejcts ActiveX Pack1. It includes vast range of components that can be used in the ASP pages (can be used on IIS without ALP too). This gives you wide range of features always available together with ALP engine and thus using them the external dependencies are lowered considerably (very helpful especially for autoruns).
All the components together form a strong foundation for desktop applications written in otherwise WEB oriented technology. As ALP is almost fully compatible with IIS (in the both directions) almost always is possible to achieve result that will work on stand-alone machines and servers without changes. The extended features in the run-time library allow the ASP applications cross the border between the typical WEB applications and the desktop applications. For example it is possible to run background threads (in script for example) and the ASP pages can control and use them to perform operations not applicable for the request-response nature of the main user interface. This combination of WEB and desktop techniques offers many of the opportunities both worlds offer (WEB and desktop programming). Many developers will find out easilly that it is much more effortless to build a WEB interface and include whatever desktop features you need in the background than building a traditional desktop application (even compared to a RAD development tool) and still there is the benefit of the simple portability (or compatibility in raw) to and from WEB server.
|