Forms Presentations at DOAG Conference 2012

And here are some tips for the DOAG Conference in Germany

Jan Peter Timmermann

Wolfgang Kriebel, Christian Kühne

My own presentation :

Perry Pakull

Stephan La Rocca

And in the afternoon we can attend at the Fusion Middleware Panel with Frank Nimphius, Duncan Mills and Jürgen Menge

Gerd

Forms Modernization at Oracle Open World

Here are some tips for the Oracle "Forms" Open World 2012

Grant talks about The Future of Oracle Forms :

Lucas presentation is about The Future, too :

Mia and Grant talk together about face-lifting-tips for Forms :

More infos can be found on Grants blog and on Mia's blog

Have fun with it
Gerd

Future of Oracle Forms conference, part 4

Wilfred van der Deijl presented "Partial and or Gradual migration by embedding existing Forms in new UI technology".

Because Oracle didn't offer a migration solution from Oracle Forms to ADF, Wilfred showed a technique to integrate existing forms applications into a new ADF application. He called it OraFormsFaces, a framework, which allows him creating hybrid applications. The non-forms part must not be ADF, so you can use other web technologies too.

This hybrid way can be used to slightly move from forms to another technology, without having Big Bangs.


In the last presentation Steven Davelaar spoke about "JHeadstart: Real world experiences for migrating Forms to ADF"

JHeadstart is a JDeveloper extension for template based working in ADF. Best practices can be used out of the box.

Stevens presentation was the last one from the General Session Part.


After a short break the "Parallel Break-Out sessions" began. In parallel sessions 3 speaker had their own room and 45 minutes to present more information about the own topic.


At 5pm the day ends with the big speaker panel.

Here we all had the chance to discuss with the speaker about forms modernization and their presentations.

The night-sessions started at 7pm. Six parallel hands-on sessions could be visited. The speakers had VMwares for the participants, so that they could test in their own environment.

At 9:30 the conference ended.

All relevant links can be found here

At that point I have to say many thanks to AMIS, all the speakers and the host Lucas Jellema. They did a great job on the conference with 89 participants.

Many thanks
Gerd

Future of Oracle Forms conference, part 3

Mia Urman started with the next presentation: "To infinity and beyond: Extend the life of your Oracle Forms application by running your existing Forms from next generation technologies/platforms without migration"

She demonstrated "next generation forms" with oraplayer. A tool, which recreates a form into a mobile version.

In the first step OraPlayer records a forms business scenario.

Then you publish it to the web. In the last step you create an UI in the technology of your choice.

While you playback the scenario you work and interact with a running forms-runtime in the background.


The presentation of Madi Serban showed the co-existence of Forms, ADF and APEX applications. It started with the question "Should we stay or should we go?" and went to redesigning applications using the Pitss-tool.


The presentation, that came next, was "Yo!Forms" from Oliver Tickell and Don Smith.

Yo!Forms is a tool, that can run forms-fmx in the web without java-plugin in pure html and javascript.

I took a photo of a live-presentation, where I could use the safari-browser of my iPhone to start a forms-runtime and work with the forms like if it were running in a JVM

The betatest of Yo!Forms is starting this year, as I heard.

to be continued
Gerd

Future of Oracle Forms conference, part 2

While Lucas Jellema was presenting his keynote, he had a time slot for Grant Ronald, live from UK via skype.

Grant told us about how we should develop in forms today, how to migrate today to Forms 11 and Forms 12 in the future. One sentence was very clear: "There are no plans to desupport Oracle Forms".



In the next presentation Francois Degrelle spoke about "Modernizing Forms using Pluggable Java Components and the Forms Look and Feel project".

He started with "Why should we use Java Beans in our Forms"

He demonstrated interesting java beans like a java calendar, a html browser, a Swing JTable integration and many more.

Important for him was the extensibility of Forms using the whole world of Java integrated in Beans.

In the second part he spoke about his open-source framework "Forms Look and Feel" and the convenience to use it in Forms.

Here is the link to the framework

to be continued
Gerd

Future of Oracle Forms conference, part 1

Yesterday I attend at the "Future of Oracle Forms" conference in Nieuwegein, Netherland.

Great conference !

Lucas Jellema from AMIS started as host with a wide overview over the history of forms, the evolution and future of forms.

After that the day was structured into 3 parts. In the first part each speaker has 30 minutes to show the topics of his presentation. Each speaker got an additionally 45 minutes afterwards, where 3 tracks run parallel in separate rooms. Last but not least, each speaker gave a 120 minutes hands-on in the evening.

to be continued tomorrow in part 2
Gerd

Conference "Future of Oracle Forms"

I got an invitation to an interesting conference in the netherlands next week (May 15th 2012).

AMIS in the netherlands is the initiator of the conference and host, too.

The conference is splitted into two parts. From 9 to 5 we will hear many presentations from the top speakers in europe. Francois Degrelle, Wilfried van der Deijl, Mia Urman and many others are on the list. In the evening we can use our own notebook to participate in hands-on-sessions!

That will be a good chance, to hear and see, what can be done to modernize your Oracle Forms.

Links to AMIS are here :

Day-Program

Evening-Program

I'm glad to meet all the speaker and can discuss with them over the future of forms.
Gerd

Oracle Reports is dying?

At the DOAG Development Panel yesterday was told about the future of Oracle Reports. That did not sound good

Next week there will be an important internal meeting at Oracle, where they speak over the future of Oracle Reports in the Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c. It looks like, that the BI Publisher will be the replacement for Reports and Oracle Reports 11g would be the last version.

That's not good... And not only because the price of the BI Publisher, I do not even speak about ...

And here is my idea to save Oracle Reports:

I need emails from all customers, who have an invest in Oracle Reports and want to save it. Write down your arguments, why you need Oracle Reports in Fusion Middleware 12c. The emailaddress is

I will bundle all answers a.s.a.p. and forward them to Oracle Development directly. They agreed with me yesterday about that. They need and want this feedback !

Very important: We don't have time and have to react very fast. Spread this idea to other customers, your colleagues, etc. They should write me in the next days.

I hope we have a chance to get our

let's try it
Gerd

Oracle Forms 12c

"Oracle Forms 12c" is the new official name in the Fusion Middleware 12 universe for our good old forms!

Heard on the German Oracle User Group Conference from the development team.

So it looks like all products are getting the c (for cloud) in their name.

Let's hope, that Fusion Middleware 12 starts in 2012 !

I just submitted "Forms 11g and the iPhone" for the DOAG Conference 2010

In some weeks the Call for Papers for the German Oracle User Group (DOAG) Conference 2010 ends.

My plan is to hold a presentation about Forms 11g and the iPhone.

The main topic of the presentation is, how you can extract modules from big Oracle Forms Applications and recreate them in a mobile version on the iPhone.

The presentation-testcase shows, how much more efficient it is to have a time-reporting on your mobile device versus the old technique, where this app was part of a big legacy application.

Another topic is to show, how you can communicate bidirectional between Forms 11g and the iPhone App. Using Advanced Queueing in Forms and Push Notifications in the App is the solution.

5 months to go and I hope I get a slot in the conference.
Gerd

The iPhone Developer Conference was great

The last two days, when I visited the conference, I got tons of new infos and ideas around the iPhone and how to create applications on it.



I think, I'll create a showcase for iPhones, where you can manipulate data through an App and parallel you see those updates automatically in a forms application. Using the newest version Forms 11 with AQ's is the basis of the showcase.

Gerd

iPhone Developer Conference in Cologne

Tomorrow starts the german's iPhone Developer Conference in Cologne.

I'll have a close look, if this is the new way of creating apps. And maybe I create the first app which can interact with Oracle Forms :-)

Let's see
Gerd

The presentation for the DOAG conference 2009 is finished

The title is: "Shout out: Oracle Designer vs. SQL Developer Data Modeler".

I'll demonstrate in the presentation the advantages and disadvantages of both tools. I base the demonstration on an EMP / DEPT example, which I design live.

Chapters of the white paper are

- Domains
- ER-Design
- Transfer ER to DataModel
- Data Modeling
- Generating DDL-Scripts
- Reverse Engineering
- Guaranteed Future

The day after the presentation I'll upload the paper to my download-portal on google-code

Gerd

New Oracle Designer ? - part 2

I just found an interesting link to the first pictures of the new "Oracle Designer".

The data modeling functions are implemented in the SQL Developer.

Have fun reading Jared's post: Data modeling with SQL Developer

Forms 11g new features: Javascript-API

Forms 11g allows the direct communication between the generic java-applet in the browser and the world around. The new JavaScript-API implements this functionality.

In Forms 11g we have a new trigger, system-variables and built-ins for the communication with the JavaScript-API.

The trigger WHEN-CUSTOM-JAVASCRIPT-EVENT fires each time, when JavaScript raises an event to forms. In the trigger we can use the payload which is stored in two system-variables. system.javascript_event_name and :system.javascript_event_value.


Informations, which were transfered from HTML to Forms, can be easily used:


In this little example we transfer in the payload the event-name "NewForm" and in the event-value the name of a form. The data is transfered from the internet-page in this way::

< INPUT id="outside_field_id">
< SCRIPT>
  function set_field (field_id, myValue) {
    document.getElementById(field_id).value=myValue;
  };
  function clickEvent1()
  {
    document.forms_applet.raiseEvent("NewForm", "payload");
  }
< /SCRIPT>
< INPUT id="button1" type="button" onClick="void clickEvent1();" value="NewForm">

Internally the method raiseEvent of the class forms_applet is used. The applet's name has to be assigned in the formsweb.cfg to the parameter applet_name.

applet_name=forms_applet

Forms can communicate bi-directional with the HTML. Therefore we can use the new built-ins web.javascript_eval_expr and web.javascript_eval_function.

 web.javascript_eval_expr
    ('document.getElementById("outside_field_id").value="' ||
     :control.ti_inside || '";');
  web.javascript_eval_expr 
    ('set_field("outside_field_id", "' || :control.ti_inside
     || '")');
  :control.ti_get_value := web.javascript_eval_function
    ('document.etElementById("outside_field_id").value');

This example-code fills in the HTML-page a field named "outside_field_id" through the built-in web.javascript_eval_expr. Two techniques can be used. Direct Assignment or the call of a javascript-function, e.g. „set_field“.
You can read field through web.javascript_eval_function. The returnvalue is the value of the corresponding field in the HTML, in this case "outside_field_id".

This is another example of how important the new features in Forms 11g are. Now it's possible for forms to communicate with the world outside the browser's applet!

DOAG Conference 2007

Today was the last day of this years conference. The DOAG (German Oracle User Group) is now 20 years old and so we had some slots in the conference like "Oracle 5.0 New Features)

That was a funny presentation from Dierk Lenz. He used his 20 years old slides and presented us all the new features from the database in 1988.

In the presentation he started a vmWare with DOS 6.22 and SQL*Forms 2



In this presentation we were nearly 200 people ! To have a look on the new Features of Oracle 5.0 :-)

Oracle Develop in Munich

The start of the week I attend at the Oracle Develop in the Arabella Sheraton Munich. Nice place, but we had to run between the presentation from one hotel to another. And the coffee machine was only in the hotel, where only one slot from five slots were...

Day 1:

Monday morning I started with Frank Nimphius presentation about Forms, the future of Forms and the integration into Java, SOA, ...

Marc Sewtz and his "SQL Developer Features" was nice, because we saw a bunch of new features in the actual release.

After lunch the famous Bryn Llewellyn started his "PL/SQL Performance: Debunking the Myths". Gorgeous! Next time I hope he gets 2 hours for all the tips and tricks he explained

Parallel to the presentations Oracle served us 3 labs. Monday evening I went into the APEX 3.0 Lab, where we learned, how to work with the new version of Application Express.


Day 2:

Bad news at the coffee-front. We had to get our coffee in Hotel A and run some 100 meters down the road to Hotel B...

Tuesday I started with the next lab: "Developing and Deploying Oracle and PHP". Interesting to see, how easy it can be, working with PHP

After that Bryn presented the new PL/SQL-Enhancements of the new Oracle DB 11g. I love compound triggers ! And all the other stuff too. Accessing sequences without selecting against DUAL !!

Post-Lunch Frank explained "Building Rich UI using JavaServer Faces and AJAX. That was another highlight too me at the conference.

Interesting, how much Microsoft-Stuff was presented through many slots. The "Microsoft Interoperability with Oracle Fusion Middleware" showed the SOA-integration made by the Office-Toolstack. Nice to see a different world to Oracle.

Summary:

Presentations and labs: TOP
No Coffee: FLOP

EOUC 2007 has been canceled

oh no...

the EMEA-Oracle-User-Council-Conference in Amsterdam has been canceled:

EOUC 2007

Update Dez. 2007: the URL is now canceled too

Invitation to EOUC 2007

The EMEA Oracle User Council's conference is this year in Amsterdam, Netherland, from May 2nd - May 3rd.

My abstract, sent to the conference some months ago was:

Oracle Forms 10g and the integration into BPEL

And now I got an invitation for May 3rd

OOW Summary

Here you see the Howard-Street, during the OOW 2006. The whole street was one big tent:



























Regis Louis and his overview about JDeveloper 11g was very refreshing, because the toolset is the center of Oracles new Fusion-Technology.




















Steven Feuerstein discused in his presentations new ways to create exception-handling in PL/SQL and how to use a professionell unit-testing-software like utPLSQL.




















Very interesting was his announcement, that he will publish a new application named Quest Code Tester, which helps you creating test-cases for automated PL/SQL-unittests. Production Releases are available in 6 months. This is the link to the new homepage for all tools around those new applications:




http://www.toadworld.com/




Bryn Llewellyn (creator of PL/SQL) showed us in his "Meet the Guru"-hour the new features of the Oracle Database 11.

The most powerful new topic is the "edition". This means that you can create a complete new version of a package / view / table. With an easy "alter system set edition = ..." you change to different versions.

e.g. when you have a set of new packages and want test them on the production-db. So you create the new packages in a new "edition". After that you can change the usage of the two versions online while the database is running. Testing the new packages and reseting to the old ones is done in seconds !














These were some of the most interesting news of the Oracle Open World