The Alex programming language was developed in the early 1990's as a cross platform rapid GUI development language, working with Microsoft Windows, as well as Motif and OpenLook on a very wide variety of Unix operating systems.

The language allowed one set of source code to produce a product that worked across platforms.

A key feature of the Alex programming language is so called "screen-scraping". This allows a program to pretend to be a standard terminal such as a vt100 and communicate with a terminal based program, the Alex language is then used to produce a graphical user interface as a front-end to the terminal based program.

This powerful technology was used to turn many old terminal based programs into apparently GUI programs with a minimum of effort and Alex is still used today for this purpose.

The most well known Alex program is UpFront  which gives a grapical user interface to old Ingres database programs.

The simplicity of developing in Alex and the power of the langauge rivals and in many ways even surpasses more well known languages such as Visual Basic!

The development of Alex was however hampered by Alex Technologies being a very small startup company and the company was forced into liquidation in 1994.

This prevented Alex ever reaching its full potential, however Alex as a language never totally died, in particular the protential of the UpFront product resulted in the continued development of the Alex language simply to serve the needs of UpFront.

Recently though the Alex language has taken on some new life with a small team of programmers using the language to create the Borg Utilities for distributed computing projects.

MarsJupiter LTD has rights to the Alex language and we are using the language to develop a set of email utilities.