Just found

now I need a floppy drive for 3,5"

:-)
Gerd

Rumors about Oracle Reports 12c

For nearly six weeks, it is rumored that Oracle Reports will not appear in the version 12c.

Since then, I tried to get information on this topic. After a few emails I got the info I needed.

The rumors are definitely wrong and no one at Oracle wants to cancel Reports 12c.

I hope that this cools down the rumor mill a little bit.

Gerd

The German ADF-Community-Book was released today

The German ADF- (and Forms-) Community released their first book.

The "ADF book" is a compilation of German lectures, articles and workshop tutorials in Oracle ADF (some of the contributions are in English!). The authors are members of the German ADF community. The time frame covers the years 2010 to 2014. The project "ADF book" was implemented by a team of staff from partner companies and Oracle.

40 authors wrote 70 contributions on 1400 pages in this book.

It's a 110 MB PDF and can be downloaded for free from the ADF-Community-Page.

Here is the direct link

My part in the book has the title "Modernizing Oracle Forms" in which I demonstrate, how easy it is to enhance Oracle Forms with modern frameworks like LAF (Look and Feel-Framework from Francois Degrelle) and how to integrate ADF in Oracle Forms via OraFormsFaces (A framework from Wilfred van der Deijl).

Have fun with the book
Gerd

Don't use INC and DEC in PL/SQL Libraries

In my oldest PL/SQL-Library in Forms 4 my first procedures were:

PROCEDURE Inc (P_Number IN OUT NUMBER) IS
BEGIN
  P_Number := P_Number + 1;
END;

PROCEDURE Dec (P_Number IN OUT NUMBER) IS
BEGIN
  P_Number := P_Number - 1;
END;

In some variations with one or two parameters I used this Increment and Decrement since 20 years! Without having trouble in all the days.

Now I found out, that DEC isn't working in newer Oracle Forms versions...

And why? Oracle created in PL/SQL a new SUBTYPE of DECIMAL and it is called "DEC". So you can use it in this way:

DECLARE
  V_Value   DEC;
BEGIN
... 

And this behaviour kills my procedure in the PL/SQL-Library :-(
All other languages know INC and DEC for incrementing and decrementing. Not Oracle!

Be careful when creating new functions which you want to use for a long time :-)
Gerd

New Statement of Direction, September 2013

The actual lifetimes of Forms and Reports can be found in this document.

The most important at a glance:

Here are some of my older Statement of Directions private copies:

SoD Oracle Fusion 2013 / 09
SoD Forms 2012 / 03
SoD Oracle Fusion 2010 / 05
SoD Forms 2009 / 07
SoD Forms 2008 / 07
SoD Forms 2007 / 11
SoD Forms 2005 / 09
SoD Forms 2005 / 05
SoD Forms 2005 / 03
SoD Forms 2004 / 06

My previous article on this topic is here

Modernizing Forms Talk

The interview, I wrote about two days ago, was made in cooperation with my presentation "How to modernize Oracle Forms". And here is the video (50 minutes in german):

The link to the slides, used in the presentation, is here. It's german too, but I hope, that chapters like "Installation Look and Feel" are so easy to understand, that nobody has language problems in most parts of the presentation.

Try it
Gerd

DOAG interview

After my last conference-presentation I was interviewed by the DOAG. The interview is in german only and the topic is "Modernizing Forms".

Content of the interview + YouTube-Info:

Many say about the appearance of Oracle Forms, this is no longer appropriate. Gerd Volberg from Opitz Consulting has looked at the open-source environment and found frameworks with which the Forms world can be spiced up. In an interview with the Head of Development SIG Christian Schwitalla Volberg presents the "Forms Look and Feel Project" by the Oracle Ace Francois Degrelle and the framework "OraFormsFaces" of Wilfred van der Deijl that combines the Forms and ADF world.

Have fun
Gerd

Oracle Forms in the Cloud - the next big thing?

The whole world speaks about working in the cloud. Why not Oracle Forms?

Why not...

Why...

Because: Oracle did it already...

Link zum Webcast

Michael Ferrante and Roger Vidal are explaining in the Webcast, how you can run your application in the cloud with the Web Logic Server and what this means for the future of Oracle Forms.

Grant points to this webcast with the words: "Oracle Forms remains a key technology..."

Have fun listening to Michael and Roger
Gerd

Behavior of Tab Canvases

The behavior of tab canvases ist very interesting, when your form gets more and more tabpages. Let's say, you have only three pages in your tab canvas. (Width Style Property = Fixed)

Forms automatically renders all three pages in the same size. That's what we expected.

In the next step we create a fourth tab:

If there is not enough space for all page-labels in the same size, then we see a first kind of resizing. All labels are readable. But the size of some pages is reduced.

If we create more tabpages:

At one point the label-text shrinks and some letters were exchanged by dots.

And in the last stage:

The last type of look and feel is, when we get a horizontal scrollbar. Think on this, when you use many tabpages in your form

Have fun
Gerd

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

Java 7 and Forms 11

Some days ago a new certification-document with an interesting info was updated:

Link to the certifications

In this excel-sheet is Forms 11.1.1.6 certified with JRE 1.7.0_04+. Very good news! And now we can hope, that Forms 11.1.2 gets the same certification soon, because this is the latest version available on OTN :

And last but not least: " Please Oracle, certify Oracle Forms 10g with JRE 7 ! "
Gerd

Java 7-Auto-Update, more Links

Here are some more links and notes to the Java 7 Auto-Update-Problem. You must log into "My Oracle Support" to see the metalink-notes.

Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap

Updated Java 6 EOL date

Note 1412103.2
Installation and Configuration for Oracle Java SE

Note 1467442.1
URGENT BULLETIN: All E-Business Suite End-Users Must Manually Apply JRE 6 Updates

Note 1469230.1
FAQ - Java SE Auto Update

Note 1470123.1
What Impact does the Desupport of Java 6 have on Fusion Middleware 11

Note 1470671.1
JRE7 Is Not Certified For Oracle Health Insurance

Actual version of JRE 1.6
Oracle JDK 6 update 33 (1.6.0_33)

have fun
Gerd

Java 7-Auto-Update Warning

It looks like, that all forms-applications run into a huge problem, starting next week, July 3rd 2012.

Oracle's Java 1.6-Updater will automatically update the JRE to 1.7 on all PC's, where auto-update is activated. And Java 1.7 is not certified with Forms 10g, Forms 11g or the E-Business-Suite (EBS-forms-components)

I try to find all relevant informations to that topic and blog them afterwards. So feel free to share this blog to all customers who may have this problem next week.


Here are the first links:

The latest news directly from E-Business Suite Development



JRE Troubleshouting Guide



OTN Forms Forum: steps to install and deinstall
Michael Armstroing describes amongst others the deinstallation of Java 1.7



And here is the description of the internal problem, why we get problems with Java 1.7



read 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