OraTransplant

Oracle Forms Modernization site on OTN

I just noticed that Grant Ronald, an Oracle Forms product manager, blogged about a new subsite on OTN “Oracle Forms Modernization”

I knew this was coming and I think it’s a good thing. It proves that Oracle is still committed to Oracle Forms as a product. They are helping Oracle Forms customers to get the most out of their investment in showing how Oracle Forms can still be used in the changing technology environment of today. I’m hoping to get my OraFormsFaces solution included on the page as well. It allows you to integrate Forms and JSF/ADF seamlessly which, I think, fits perfectly with the “Forms Modernization” theme.

I just fear the people who keep claiming that Oracle is dropping Forms will use this site as another argument for their cause. They can (will?) argue that Oracle is pushing Forms customers to new technology and that this site is just another means to accomplish this. I guess, there’s nothing Oracle can do to please these people. I think, you should see this site as a positive thing. It’s not telling people to move away from Forms and move to any new technology. It’s just explaining to Forms users how they can integrate Forms with new technology IF they want to (there’s no pressure there). It fits perfectly with the Oracle Forms strategy of “Upgrade and Integrate”; upgrade your Oracle Forms installation to the latest version and benefit from the advantages of new technologies by integrating the two worlds. That happens to fit perfectly with the OraFormsFaces approach as well. It allows you to integrate Forms and JSF seamlessly, in a way that cannot be accomplished with the out-of-the-box Oracle Forms product.

Integrate Oracle Forms and JSF/ADF Faces with drag-and-drop

I am happy and proud to announce the public availability of OraFormsFaces, a JSF component library to integrate Oracle Forms and JSF or ADF Faces. This allows you to embed Oracle Forms in a JSF page and truly integrate the two, including passing context, events, eliminating Forms applet startup time, and many more features.

I feel this is the key ingredient that is missing from Oracle’s offerings. Forms is a mature product and Oracle has a great Java stack, but unfortunately you cannot really integrate the two in a single application. This leaves many of the traditional Forms users with a dilemma. They might want to use the Java stack for new developments, but they don’t want to be forced into a rewrite of there Forms application to this Java stack.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you can use the Java stack for new developments but protect your investment in Oracle Forms? With OraFormsFaces, you can. You can build new JSF or ADF Faces based web applications and integrate your existing Forms applications in them. You can pass parameters from JSF to Forms and the other way around. Both Forms and JSF can raise events (commands or triggers) in the other technology. With the possibility of integrating Forms into JSF, you can even go one step further and integrate Oracle Forms in any other web technology, whether it is Oracle Portal, Oracle WebCenter, PHP, ASP.Net, or something else.

I’ve prepared two demo movies showing different ways of integrating Forms and JSF; the first one keeps the powerful multi-document interface of Oracle Forms, whereas the second one makes the Forms look like a true web application and could be used for a smooth migration from Oracle Forms to web technology.

As some of you know, I’ve been working on this concept since 2005. Initially it was a quest for a way to interact programmatically with the Forms applet running in the client web browser. In summer 2007 I presented a solution to the world at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference, and later I published the same solution in an OTN article, an Oracle OpenWorld 2007 presentation, and several other places. The solution is based on a JavaScript API that enables Forms to execute JavaScript in the browser and JavaScript in the client page to interact with the Forms applet. The concept as presented in 2007 was still very technical and required quite some work form both the Forms and the Java programmer.

Since summer 2007 a lot has happened. It took a lot of work and that’s why it’s been much too quiet on this blog. The same basic concept has been wrapped in a JSF component library.Now it’s as simple as dropping a JAR file in your Java project and drag-and-drop a Form, FormParameter, or FormCommand component to your JSF page in a visual editor. See some other screencasts on how easy it is to get this done in JDeveloper. Also, a lot more features have been added since the proof-of-concept in 2007. For instance, making it compatible with Single Sign On basically required a complete rearchitect and rewrite of the solution.

The solution is now available for everyone as the OraFormsFaces library. You can download two running demo applications to look at the end result first. If that got you interested, you can download a trial version of OraFormsFaces and the OraFormsFaces Developer’s Guide to get started for yourself. If you do run into any problems, feel free to ask at the forum or file a bug report in the issue tracker.

Good luck integrating your Oracle Forms application with your latest JSF or ADF Faces applications.

Presenting on integrating Forms and JSF

Besides my first session on Forms to SOA yesterday, I also had my other presentation on integrating Forms and JSF. In the end I was very pleased with the session. I finished right on time and go some very positive feedback from the audience. In fact I had some follow up meetings yesterday and will have some more today with people interested in the technology. If you missed the session you can still take a look at the slides. Perry Pakull from Germany attended both of my session and blogged about it (in German).

In the presentation I demonstrated how it is possible to seamlessly integrate Oracle Forms into a JSF web application. In fact, you can use the same technologies to integrate Forms in any other web technology. I started of with some introduction about Eurotransplant and myself, just to get a feeling of where our need to integrate Forms and JSF came from.

Eurotransplant decided to move from Forms to web development a number of years ago. The main reason being that the majority of our users are remote and infrequent users. Oracle Forms doesn’t fit these users very well. Forms is not as intuitive as users nowadays expect. They’ve gotten used to intuitive web applications.

So, we wanted to move to web development but we also had a large Forms application. We didn’t want to rewrite the entire Forms application in new web technology. That’s when my quest began for integrating both worlds. We wanted to be able to use web technology for all new developments while protecting our investment in Forms. From an end user perspective this would mean the end user can navigate between newly built web pages and traditional Oracle Forms in an easy manner. It must be possible to pass context/data and events from the web application into Oracle Forms and the other way around. It should be possible to pass the ID of the selected customer, order, etc. into Oracle Forms.

I demoed the end result of this integration in my presentation and will upload a movie of the same demo later this week or next week. Then I moved on explaining the underlying techniques used for this integration:

• Inbound JavaScript API which gives the ability to call into Forms from JavaScript, raising a Forms PL/SQL trigger and passing a payload
• Outbound JavaScript API which gives Forms the ability to execute a snippet of JavaScript
• A technology to eliminate the tradition 5-10 seconds startup time of the Forms applet. By using the legacy lifecycle cache only the very first web page in a session that embeds an Oracle Form gets the startup penalty of starting the applet. All subsequent pages that embed an Oracle Forms applet will reuse the (suspended) applet from the initial page.
• The OPTIONAL visual integration to remove a lot of the chrome from Oracle Forms: the menu, toolbar, statusbar, etc. With this approach the end user doesn’t notice she is using Oracle Forms. This can be a strategic advantage. It allows you to replace a web page that embeds an Oracle Forms with a true web page at a later stage without impact on the end users. This can be a major benefit to your and the way to a smooth and slow transition from Oracle Forms to JSF. You can just as easily skip this step and confront the end user with the full Oracle Forms applet with all bells and whistles. It’s whatever suits your needs better.
• Finally I had a slide on actually including the HTML in your web page to start the Forms applet. You should really use some sort of template for this as the legacy lifecycle cache demands that the applet declaration is 100% identical on each web page. Each web technology has its own way for using templates.

I finished of with a demo of the JSF Component Library I’ve created. This JSF Component Library hides all the required technology and complexity from the web page developer and the Forms developer. It’s as simple as adding a single JAR file to your JDeveloper project. Then you can drag-and-drop a Forms component onto your web page. Set some simple properties (name of the Form module file and dimensions of the applet area) and you’re done. Run your page and you have a web pages that embeds an Oracle Forms. You can just as easily drag-and-drop data control items onto the Form to pass the as parameter or drag-and-drop methods or actions onto the Form to enable the Form to initiate these JSF actions/navigation from PL/SQL. There’s a movie showing a similar demo.

I ended of with a small summary with some key points:

• You can use this technology as a smooth transition from Oracle Forms to a web technology. It allows to you replace Forms with true web pages one-form-at-a-time
• If you’re happy with Forms and have no need to migrate to web technology, you can just as easily use this technology to integrate Forms and your web applications. For example, you can have a web based portal that’s used by your call center agents and a link that leads to a page that embeds your existing Forms application to drill down to the details of the overview of the initial portal page.
• The JavaScript API is the key technology to get this integration working. This is a native Forms 11 feature, but I demonstrated this can also be added to existing versions of Oracle Forms by subclassing the Forms applet class and using a Pluggable Java Component in your Forms
• You can either build this integration yourself if you’ve got enough knowledge on HTML. Java, JavaScript, CSS and PL/SQL. For this look at previously published papers and guides.
• If you’re not comfortable building and maintaining all of this yourself, you could just as easily use our JSF Component Library and get started right away. I’ll be publishing more details on the library, including demos, as soon as possible. This week is fully packed with OpenWorld activities, so be sure to check back regularly.

My first presentation at OpenWorld

Yesterday I presented both of my sessions at Oracle OpenWorld. In the morning I had a joined session with Jan Carlin, Forms product manager from Oracle. The session was titled “Oracle Forms: Strategy and the Road to SOA”. Jan started the session with some Forms strategy and an overview of what SOA is and how Forms can play a role in a Service Oriented Architecture.
Jan took questions during the sessions and there were quite a few. I’m still surprised how many people are not aware of Oracle’s Tools Statement of Direction. People are still hearing rumors and are thinking that Forms will be desupported very soon. Some were quite surprised that a version 11 of Forms is forthcoming. In fact version 11 will have some critical new features to integrate Forms with other technologies. For me the two most important ones are the ability to react to Advanced Queuing events from Forms and the new JavaScript API to Forms 11. In fact, these plans were already announced by Oracle in Jun 2006. Read that article for a more detailed description of new Forms 11 features.

Jan’s talk and the associated questions took a bit longer than expected. This left me only 20 minutes for my part of the presentation. I still think I got most of the points across to the audience. I talked about Eurotransplant’s path from Forms to a Service Oriented Architecture. This started with the move of most business logic out of Forms and into the database. The next critical step was the upgrade form client server Forms to web based Oracle Forms a number of years ago. At the end of our path to SOA was the introduction of Java web based development and lately the introduction of BPEL.

There were quite a few questions at the end of my session. For me, that’s a good thing as it indicated people were truly interested and they didn’t run of as soon as they could. Quite a few people approached me after the session for specific questions. In the end this took so long we had to be kicked out of the room since the next session was about to start. For me, this was a very successful session and hopefully the audience has the same opinion.

Session on integrating Forms and JSF moved to a bigger room

My session in integrating Oracle Forms and JSF has been moved to a bigger room. It was overbooked by 50%, so Oracle decided to move it to a room twice its size. So, if you are interested in attending this session and couldn’t register before, please try again.

The session will show the concepts used by Eurotransplant to integrate Oracle Forms and JSF. This enables you to embed Oracle Forms in any web application with full passing of context and events between the two technologies. It also eliminates the normal Forms applet startup time which would prevent a user quickly switching from Forms to JSF in a normal application. The session even shows a fully functional JSF Component Library to hide all the necessary technology from both the Forms developer and the JSF page developer. It’s a matter of drag-and-drop a Form and its parameters from the Component Palette to your JSF page in JDeveloper.

Movie showing JSF component to integrate Oracle Forms

I’m about to release a JSF component library to the public that can integrate Oracle Forms in a JSF/ADF Faces web application. As a sneak preview I’ve already put up the first screencast movie demonstrating how easy it is to embed an Oracle Form in a JSF page.

The component library not only supports the embedding of a Form like shown in the demo. It also allows you to pass parameters to the Form, pass parameters back from Forms to JSF, execute JSF navigation from Forms PL/SQL. On top of all that, it only starts the Forms applet once for your entire web session. So even when a user is switching between pages with and without an embedded Form, the user will not have to wait 5-10 secs for the Forms applet to start.

If you’re interested please check back soon for more information. If you’re visiting Oracle OpenWorld this year, be sure to enroll for my session on Monday. I’ll be talking about the technical details of JSF-Forms integration and will also be showing the JSF component library that was used to create this demo movie.

Got my speaker invitation for Oracle OpenWorld 2007

I just returned from a very rainy holiday in Cornwall, UK. After a good night sleep, I checked my email and was happy to see an invitation to speak at Oracle OpenWorld 2007 in San Francisco. After the success of my paper and presentation at ODTUG Kaleidoscope on integrating Oracle Forms and JavaServer Faces, I decided to submit an updated version of the abstract to Oracle OpenWorld through ODTUG.

It does mean another trip to the USA, which is a good thing. It also means a whole lot of work to prepare for the presentation. I want to add two things compared to the ODTUG version. I’m working on a full featured JSF component that does all the integration for you. This hides a lot of the complexity of the integration from the page developer. I would love to demonstrate this component approach at OpenWorld, but that would mean I have to finish it by then and it still needs a lot of work. Another thing I want to add to the presentation is a demonstration or at least explanation of how the integration can be done with Oracle Forms 11g. This new version will have a native JavaScript API which removes the need of adding this API to Forms yourself. This means the integration between JSF and Forms should be much cleaner when using Forms version 11g. A beta version of Forms 11g should be available before OpenWorld, so I hope to do some testing before OpenWorld.

Here’s the abstract I submitted:

Positive evaluation for ODTUG 2007 presentation

I just got the evaluations for my presentation at ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 on integrating Oracle Forms into Oracle ADF Faces. I must say that I’m pleasantly surprised. Two thirds of the audience rated the session 5 out of 5, and one third 4 out of 5. Not a bad score. I especially appreciate the comments people fill in on the evaluation form. Sometimes this gives a much better indication of how people felt. For me, all the comments are positive although one attendant noted it might bee too technical for some developers. This was also my fear, but as it turns out 100% indicated the technical level was spot on.

Again, I’m very happy and proud of this positive evaluation for my first ever presentation at an international conference. This makes ODTUG 2007 a memorable moment for me: my first ever paper won the Editor’s Choice Award and I got a very positive evaluation for my presentation.

The detailed results are below:

Overall Session Rating

Evaluations

Technical Level

Comments

• What were the strengths of this presentation?
• Documentation
• Innovative and ver applicatble to current development.
• Possible alternative for keeping forms around.
• Tech level and code snippets
• Amazing!
• Great technical how-to content
• Very detailed, clear, held together well
• Great job!
• Very practical for my needs.
• Useful, novel material
• What were the weaknesses of this presentation?
• Probably too tehnical for some developers
• What recommendations do you have for improvement of this presentation?
• Thank you! Great stuff

Update 11 july 2007: I asked ODTUG if they were planning on publishing the average of all sessions combined. This could give an idea of how a session scored compared to the other sessions. ODTUG is not publishing these results, but the could tell me that scores below 4.0 need work, between 4.0 and 4.3 are very good, and above 4.3 are excellent. So, with an overall score of 4.67, I can be satisfied.

Just won the ODTUG Editor’s Choice Award

I was thrilled to just receive the ODTUG 2007 Editor’s Choice Award for my paper for the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference. I’ll post a picture later on, because I forgot the cable to connect my camera to my laptop.

Anyhow, I’m quite thrilled with this award. It’s the first paper I ever submitted to an international conference and it’s great to receive the Editor’s Choice Award right away. The only downside is things can only go downhill from now on

It’s a nice engraved award to hang on your wall. Here’s what it says:

Editor’s Choice Award

In Recognition of Exceptional
Technical Content and Visual Presentation
in Your ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 Paper

Protecting Your Forms Investment
While Moving to the Web

Wilfred van der Deijl
Eurotransplant

ODTUG 2007
Datona Beach, Florida

Update 20-jun-2007: I just noticed that my employer, Eurotransplant, released a news item on me winning this award. I only wished they would have another picture on file for me. Now, how do you stay humble with all of this attention…

Update 21-jun-2007: The Automatisering Gids, a dutch IT magazine, also picked up on the news. They’ve included a news item on their site and in their feed. You can say what you want, but this does make you feel proud of yourself.

Integration of Oracle Forms and ADF Faces on OTN

I’m proud that my first ever OTN article just got published. It’s about the integration of Oracle Forms and Oracle ADF Faces. That’s a subject I’ve been blogging and writing about a lot lately. I’ve even put up a dedicated page about the subject to collect all the information and links.

The OTN article is currently even featured on the OTN homepage. The last time I was featured on the OTN homepage, was when I blogged about moving your design information from Oracle Designer to a JDeveloper based solution. My blog posting was featured on the OTN page for a couple of days and caused a huge spike in blog traffic. Let’s wait and see what a featured OTN article does to the traffic volume on my blog. But more importantly the OTN article will probably help to spread the word about this concept much better then just publishing on my own blog. I’m very anxious to see what might come from the OTN article.

The proof is below: