OraTransplant

XML Publisher for download on OTN

I’m in the middle of evaluating XML Publisher as a possible replacement for Oracle Reports. More on that later in a series of blog postings. While I was doing this, I noticed XML Publisher is now available for download on OTN. It used to be only available on the (far less known) edelivery.oracle.com. Oracle offering evaluation licenses on OTN for XML Publisher will certainly give XML Publisher more attention than it used to.

Just wanted to let you all know it’s available on OTN. If you want to have a look yourself, go ahead. You can also wait a couple of days and read my forthcoming series of blog postings about my evaluation of XML Publisher as a possible replacement for Oracle Reports.

PS. At ODTUG, I heard XML Publisher will be rebranded to BI Publisher to become part of Oracle’s BI offering.

Conversion to webforms 10g completed

Today we started production on our new webforms 10g environment. This completes our migration from client-server Forms/Reports 6i running on Citrix MetaFrame to Forms and Reports 10g (v9.0.4.1) running on two Linux application servers. In total we’ve migrated 601 files (299 forms, 23 menus, 76 pl/sql libraries, 4 object libraries and 199 reports).

We also integrated Forms with Single Sign On. We’re building a number of J2EE web-applications and we didn’t want users to have to logon to each application separately. Our existing extranet has also been integrated with SSO and now functions as a portal to the user.

We’ll be running the new Forms 10g environment and the old 6i (on Citrix) environment in parallel for two months. This gives our 400 external users some time to switch to Internet Explorer/Java/Acrobat. It also means we’ll have to support both environments for a while. This is why development is still on 6i and the files are converted to 10g during deployment to test/production environments. This means our conversion process has to be repeatable. That’s why I’ve created a java program based on the JDAPI to do this conversion. You can read more details about this program in a past blog entry.

When we shutdown the Citrix environment, developers will start using Developer Suite 10g. By then, the JDAPI based conversion tool will no longer be needed. However, it has been a very valuable experience. I think we’ll continue to use JDAPI based tools for several things. One of the first things on my list is an automated tool for QA checks.