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    Overview for developers
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          <H4>Why ALP?</H4>
          <P>Today we can choose between many RAD environments, virtual engines and development tools. Some of them
          concentrate on aiding the programmer, others go further and supply entire world of components and tools. However
          none of them is as easy and powerful as the good old ASP (Active Server Pages) and the only feature ASP lacks of 
          is the fact it is not for the desktop programming. ALP changes the situation and allows ASP apges to be used
          for desktop development as like for WEB development. Furthermore ALP keeps good compatibility with IIS and the
          other ASP enabled WEB servers and this allows easy porting of applications from WEB to desktop and vice-versa.
          Additional benefit is the ability to build combined application - part of them work on the desktop part on the 
          WEB server. In contrast to any other ASP engines ALP ships with more components but serves them as usual ActiveX
          instead of serving them as custom extensions. This protects the developer from the temptation to write applications
          in ALP sepcific manner and allows deployment of certain ALP features to the WEB server machine when needed. Some of
          the most important examples are NetProbe and ActiveX pack1. These components give the application ultimate power
          to manage local and remote resources, to construct data structures in memory and run other scripts. All the 
          components can be deployed on a WEB server as well and are implemented as <B>both</B> and <B>free</B> threaded
          to give the developer freedom to use them in any possible situation as appropriate.
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          <P>ALP applications are able to establish communication with online applications, FTP servers, other local engines,
          3-D party protocols and so on. The communication between them can be arranged in many possible ways - from XML exchange
          to ConfigFile based streams. Depending on the deployment requirements the developer may choose the best way and is
          able to use it on ALP and IIS as well!
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          <P>ALP supports Windows 95 and later. You may wonder why not Java or .NET then? Well, the answer is simple - 
          they are big, sometimes problematic on the older platforms, they need installation before the application can start.
          Also you have almost everything you may ever need implmented in ActiveX components from different vendors and
          any application can be developed using Active Scripting (VBScript/JScript etc.) and deployed with the required
          components much more easilly than entire Java machine for example. Also Java and .NET will be too slow and will
          consume too much memory (especially Java) which will make them a menace for the older and slower machines you may
          want to reach with your applications. Furthermore ASP technology is simple, but enough extensible, while the object
          oriented environments may need a lot of time to learn in depth.
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          <P>So, ALP is simple and portable across the most popular PC platform. It runs on the desktop, you have DHTML and
          powerful extensions with ALPFrame. Using a RAD environment will never give you protability to the WEB server and
          will not simplify your work even if it has all these wizards and form designers - good old HTML will be able to 
          beat it. The price? ALP costs $600 for developer license - buy once and there is no need to pay per each development
          workstation or per applicaiton built with it.
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