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I’ll be speaking at the Oracle User Group Norway Spring Conference, April 14 to 16. This great conference takes place on a cruise ship sailing from Oslo to Kiel and back. My topics will be

• What’s Hot and What’s Not - An Overview of Oracle Development Tools
• Forms to ADF - Live!

They’ve lined up an impressively international speaker list, including Dan Morgan, Debra Lilley and Sue Harper - and me, of course …

See you in Oslo!

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At the UKOUG conference in Birmingham, I gave a presentation entitled “Life After Forms” for people wondering what to do about their Forms applications. The reason that people consider this is of course that the talk in the Oracle community tend to concentrate on the two new options: ADF Faces and Application Express.However, whenever I talk to Oracle customers at conferences and on-site, most are still running Oracle Forms.In order to get some hard numbers, I gathered some statistics from the OTN Forms forum. Interestingly, the number of posts on this forum show almost a completely straight line since the forums started in 1998 (see figure below). This means that the interest in Forms (as measured by OTN Forum threads) has remained constant over more than 10 years - and shows no sign of tapering off.So if you are still running Oracle Forms, you are not alone. And with Oracle promising support until at least 2017, there are no technical reasons why you should rush out and re-develop existing Forms applications.

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Oracle has for a long time offered “Statements of Direction” outlining their strategy in various areas. One the statements I have been following with interest is the one that applies to Oracle Forms and Reports.

The latest version of this reassuringly says about Forms and Reports: “Oracle has no plan to desupport these products. Furthermore, new version of Oracle Forms,Oracle Reports will continue to be released as part of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Forms 11g and Oracle Reports 11g are components of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.”

However, the document now starts by saying that “It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.”

With this sleight of hand, Oracle has effectively retracted their commitment to the old tools. If a Statement of Direction cannot not be relied upon, what is the purpose?

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One of the three presentations I’ll be giving at the UKOUG Technology & E-Business Suite conference 2009 in Birmingham Nov 30 - Dec 2 is “Forms to ADF - Live!”. For this presentation, I am going to convert an existing Oracle Forms application to an ADF Faces (web) application.

Now, instead of just converting the same old Forms demo application again, I would like to use a couple of real-life Forms. So if you would like to see what your existing Forms application might look like in ADF, please send me an e-mail (sten@vesterli.com).

What I am looking for:

• a couple of Forms of medium complexity
• all necessary support files (PLL etc)
• a database create script (tables, PL/SQL etc)
• an export or a script for creating realistic test data
• a bit of your time answering my questions on the app
• your permission to show your app during my conference presentations

What I’ll give back:

• a running ADF web application with the same functionality
• a JDeveloper Workspace with all the code

There’ll be no cost to you, of course. I look forward to hearing from you!

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I’m off to Monterey for the annual ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference June 21 to 25. 

I’ll be presenting on “Simple SOA - A Real-Life Case Study” during the Web Architecture Symposium Sunday. If you want to twitter about this presentation (or even ask me a question during the session) please use tag #odtug S458. 

My other presentation is the latest overview of the Oracle tool stack: “What’s Hot and What’s Not” on Thursday. Here, I’ll be discussing Oracle Forms, Application Express, ADF and many other tools. The twitter tag for this presentation is #odtug S392 - questions are welcome. If you can’t make it to the conference, the conclusion from this presentation can be found on the Oracle Tools page.

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It’s rumoured that Oracle is working on a Forms migration tool that will read the Forms XML (from the XML Converter that comes with Oracle Forms) and produce APEX components - very interesting…

Have a look at David Peake’s Blog for more details.

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At the Oracle Forms Strategy event at the local Oracle office in Ballerup, Denmark, quite a few people admitted they were still running Oracle Forms 6i (client/server, of course). They are officially on their own from tomorrow, when extended support for Forms 6i runs out. If you are still on Oracle Forms 6i, it is definitely about time to think hard about your future direction.

You have several options:

• Migrate to the latest version of Forms (Oracle promises Forms support to 2013 and beyound). You can do this manually (it’ll take you 1-2 hours per form on average) or use a tool. At Scott/Tiger, we recommend (and sell) the PITSS.CON tool, but there are other (less expensive) options as well
• Migrate your code to something else (Java or .NET). There are tool vendors offering to do this more or less automatically.
• Develop new code (ADF strongly recommended). To reuse the business logic in your Forms, move it into the database - that allows you both to call it directly from Java, or to generate PL/SQL Web Services to call from any application

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Oracle Denmark is hosting an Oracle Forms Strategy session featuring Grant Ronald (and others, including myself) on January 29th at the Oracle office in Ballerup. If you are based in Denmark and are running Oracle Forms, consider dropping by.

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