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

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).

Solution 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.

Solution 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.

Solution 3

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.

Solution 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!

Solution 5

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.

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Comments

[mwilliams]

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).

[Matthew Watson]

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.

[Zathrus]

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.

[jle]

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.

[Erich Kitzmueller]

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 ;-)

[JulesLt]

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.

[choudhury smrutiranjan parida]

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 ?