Best solution for migration from Oracle Forms 6i to the web? [closed]

Question

I work in an Oracle shop. There's a toolset that consists of roughly 1000 Oracle Forms (using the Forms builder from 6i, early 90's software) with Oracle 10g on the back end. It's serving roughly 500 unique people a month, with 200 concurrent connections at any given time during the work day.

Obviously this is something that needs to be addressed to get rid of the Forms runtime and move to a web based solution. The tools need to be accessed from Windows, Linux, various UNIX's, VMS and Solaris.

What options out there exist that would be feasible to migrate to? Not only does it need to be feasible for migration but the development will need to be done by 8 or so engineers who support the tool set (and many of which who would prefer to stay put and not modernize this tool set).

Oracle offers a few solutions that convert Oracle Forms into a crappy Java Applet (it's a very terrible temporary solution).

My solution of choice has been migrating to Ruby on Rails (which I'm a big proponent of Rails) but this will involve a learning curve (which we'll hit with any solution) for other developers. Also, the other difficulty in this is converting some very complex forms to HTML forms.

Has anyone tackled such a solution? Are there any packages offered by anyone outside of Oracle?

Any specific Java Web frameworks?

Would GWT, jQuery UI, ExtJS or any other JavaScript UI frameworks offer the rich user experience needed?

.NET is a consideration but a last resort (mostly because of license costs, there's no room in the budget in addition to what we're paying for Oracle licenses).

Howler

Answer 1

That's exactly what I am currently doing using...

Oracle Application Express

The learning curve is much smaller than most web-based alternatives for Forms developers, as all the code is in PL/SQL (unless you start getting fancy with Javascript, which you can). Also, in the latest release of Application Express (3.2), there is a tool to convert Forms applications to Apex.

It comes free with Oracle versions since 9.2.

Labor

Thanks for this, I'll have to contact the powers that be to see if this was ever considered an option (it looks very decent). – Howler

Saw the forms conversion running at Oracle 20:20 the other day, seems pretty decent, it wont do 100% conversion for you, but will give you a jump start. – Guinn

Anyone know if this can handle interfacing to external programs? We have a Oracle 6i F&R frontend that uses a external C program for serial port support and some java for other things. – Woke

You can use the Oracle DB however you want. I populate data in the Oracle DB with a .Net app (because APEX can't handle the massive web service that I am using). I then use APEX for a front end. Works great. – Stow

Zathrus: Making your web application interact with external C programs on the client is difficult, no matter which tool or framework is used on the server side. Using unpatched IE5 on the client side might help ;-) – Loosejointed

Depends on if your C code is doing something that has to execute on the Client (in which case you will have problems with anything operating inside the restrictions of the browser, inc Flash). Otherwise you could either implement as an Extproc on the DB server (a good migration for old Forms user exits) or as an Apache CGI module. If you need DB access from the C might be worth looking at Oracle's app server for session pooling, etc, but straight CGI is simpler. – Chambers

I have a requirement for doing the reverse i,e I need to convert oracle apex forms to asp.net web form/application. Any free/paid tool available ? – Spiraea

Answer 2

I'll +1 for Oracle Application Express -- I think that there are some significant advantages in your situation.

1. Free licensing
2. It may bean attractive option to the current staff, if they are Oracle bigots like me.
3. It's 100% web, and in 11g doesn't even require a web tier.

Thomajan

Answer 3

A really late answer, but relevant. The upcoming V3.2 release of Oracle Application Express adds an Oracle Forms migration tool, which you might find improves your productivity even further.

Veradis

Answer 4

You should check out this site http://www.forms2net.com/ it's Migration Tool of Oracle Forms to .Net. It's pretty good stuff!

Stubblefield

Answer 5

In The Netherlands QAFE ( http://www.qafe.com ) is becoming a populair alternative. They have been around for a couple of years now, serving companies outside Europe as well.

Their claim to fame

• Automatically convert and reuse 60-70% of the code
• Apply filterrules to make the output cleaner (remove all no longer applicable / needed code). A new feature to improve the quality of the output code.
• Use the output and edit/run directly in QAML Builder
• Provide your styling (by means of CSS)
• Bulk process Forms after a ruleset is defined
• Forms Analysis for a better impact analysis
• Render to any web technology you want (also to yet to be developed technologies) without the hassle - because the presentation layer is separated from the 'logic'

I work for the company that developed this platform so do not take my word for it, try it yourself and let me know what you think; I think these guys made the best package outside of Oracle.

Entoblast

Answer 6

Oracle maintains a list of vendors who all specialize in doing exactly what you need to do.

This is a very common and popular topic due to the large installed base of Oracle Forms. If you do a simple Google search there are lots of accounts of making this transition.

In my personal experience, we had luckily structured our Oracle Forms applications to have nice PL/SQL APIs. It was simple to re-use all the existing PL/SQL in our transition to J2EE, which we did manually. It sounds like you have too many Forms to do that efficiently, though.

Photocompose

Answer 7

Oracle Migration Assistant is free. It pretty much does exactly what PITSS does for the Migration. PITSS offers some neat things that can be used going forward, which will justify the cost. But if it's a Forms Migration you need, Migration Assistant does the same job.

But if you do purchase PITSS, you could easily write a script to rename a set of forms to something repeatable and write a log of what the names where. Load under names like 1.fmb, 2.fmb, etc. Perform the changes. Then rename them back using another log file that references the log file. Then repeat for another set of forms. Could save you thousands per 100 forms.

And the reports migration is a waste of time. You will have to open each form anyway and reposition fields, especially on the parameter form. That's all you would have to do without the PITSS tool.

Orelu

Answer 8

Try contacting the folks at ATX about this: http://www.atxtechnologies.co.uk/java/forms2java/. J2EE Java plus Adobe Flex means that the licensing is probably free (unless you want Flash Builder as well). If it's like Forms2Net, the conversion rate will be fairly high and you'll get good quality Java code afterwards.

Macdonell

Answer 9

Hi I work for PITSS (pitssamerica.com), and I want to elaborate on what gwoods1412 stated. You can migrate from any version of Oracle Forms 2.3, 3.0, 4.0, 4.5, 5.0, 6i, or 9i to 10g. The tool also migrates your Oracle Reports, and we have a solution to cure the issue with using the Reports parameter form. Oracel Forms and Reports 10g is a Web Based Solution, so you don't have to bite off the expense of a migration to another platform.

APEX is free to use, but it isn't free to migrate to. And the migration tool only extracts the fields (items), it does not take the Business Logic. So you are not getting your real investment out of your forms, you are getting a query and field description.

If you use a tool like PITSS.con, you will be testing you application on the web in a few days. Your developers will be working on other projects, and all will be right in the world. Oh yeah, you can interoperate with APEX, ADF, Java, .NET, etc once you are in 10g too. That means new development can be done in a new toolset. You start a gradual methodical migration to a new technology. Pretty nice to not have a huge launch party in two years when you can have one this month.

And APEX isn't really an enterprise solution. Here's a quote from David Peake who is Oracle APEX Product Manager:

"One of my key goals is to not over sell APEX conversion capabilities and ensure that attendees understand that converting Forms requires significant investment and is not going to be easy, no matter what tool you are converting to."

I stole that quote from Grant Ronald's (Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Manager ) blog which can viewed at Grant's Blog

Succotash

Answer 10

Hi i have done a similar work using GWT/springs/ORMS combination, the results are fantastic ,how ever it also depends on the complexity of business process mine was a very very complex business process, what i did was segragate all the layers and treat each layer as a service , in the process i made an application which every one goes wow and at the same time is eligible for many certifications , but if you want to do it more faster and not change the front end u can use exodus cheers

vasem

[email protected]

Sororate

Answer 11

I have found that PITSS.CON, developed by PITSS ( http://www.pitssamerica.com ) is the best out there Oracle Forms Migration. Instead of doing this manually, where you can spend up a few months with a couple hundred forms or a couple years with over a thousand, PITSS.CON, enables one to migrate from any 2.3 to 10g in a matter of days. Its unbelievable what this tool can do.

Industrious

Answer 12

You really need to check out the Forms Conversion utility from TurboEnterprise. I do not use Oracle Forms but a friend of mine has used their software to covert Oracle Forms and he loves it. They also have a free version on their website too i think. www.turbo-enterprise.com

Differentiable