OraTransplant

OraFormsFaces at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 (including slides)

25 September 2008 at 22:05 CEST | In Uncategorized |

I finally have time to write about my own session last Tuesday. I presented on OraFormsFaces, a technology (or toolkit) we developed to integrate Oracle Forms into JSF, ADF, or any other web technology. A simple example can be seen below:

This technology allows you to take an existing Oracle Forms module and just embed it in your web application with little or no changes to the Form. We feel this is a revolutionary technology for Forms customers. It allows you to reuse existing Forms as fully functional web application components. You can fully interact with the forms, pass data from your web application to Forms PL/SQL and back and it’s even possible for other UI components to trigger PL/SQL command and vice versa. This is really something you would have to see to believe it.

The room was almost full and people were very enthusiastic. I got some very good questions during the presentation, which is always nice. It gives me the feeling that people are really listening and interested. At the end of the presentation about 10-15 people approached me at the front and asked even more questions sometimes very specific to their situation. This again proved to me that they’re really interested in the concept and apparently the concept came across.

I also did a couple of slides on Oracle JHeadstart, a toolkit from Oracle in the Netherlands. This started out as a toolkit to help you in building new ADF web applications according to the best practices as learned by Oracle Consulting. But recently they added the Forms2ADF Generator to their toolkit. That’s something I wanted to mention in my presentation as that’s probably interesting to the same target audience. Forms2ADF helps you in moving away from Oracle Forms and reuse the data structures and other metadata in your Oracle Forms modules to get you started with building ADF web pages with JHeadstart.

I feel that the combination of JHeadstart Forms2ADF and OraFormsFaces might be ideal for many Forms users out there. They can use OraFormsFaces to embed their existing Forms in a ADF web application. In fact, if this ADF web application is built using JHeadstart you can have OraFormsFaces integration out-of-the-box as JHeadstart has built-in support for it. Then, over time people might want to replace individual OraFormsFaces/ADF pages with newly built ADF pages that no longer reuse Forms and its business logic. Then they can use the Forms2ADF Generator to extract as much metadata as possible from the Forms module to get a real head start in rebuilding similar functionality in ADF.

During the rest of the week I’ve been approached by quite a number of people interested in the product. I’ve spoken to a number of Forms users, sometimes together with Steven Davelaar from the Oracle JHeadstart team. The concept seems to catch on. Last year at OpenWorld I presented on the same technology which was brand new back then. Since then it’s evolved even further and it has gotten quite some attention in the Forms community. It seems concepts like this need some time and “buzz” to catch on. This OpenWorld there was much more interest in it. I heard that quite a number of people stopped by at the Oracle Forms demo grounds pod to ask about the OraFormsFaces solution. That a good thing, especially since I know the Oracle Forms product managers also see the benefit of this solution for some clients. Having them endorse the solution is always a good thing. So even if it did get quite some attention, I feel that there should be even more Forms customers that should be interested in the product. But it’s still hard to reach as much of them as possible, especially at OpenWorld in the middle of 1700 other sessions.

For people interested in OraFormsFaces that could not attend the session; you can still download the slides and have a look for yourselves. If you are interested in the technology, feel free to contact me for more information.