Future So Bright I Got to Wear Shades – Thoughts on Future of Forms Conference – May 15

Yesterday I presented at the Future of Oracle Forms event sponsored by AMIS in the Netherlands.

I must say it was literally one of the most impressive gatherings of Oracle Forms minds I ever saw.  All the speakers themselves could fill a room but to have Lucas Jellma, Grant Ronald, Steven Davelaar,  Francois Degrelle etc.. all together in the same conference was amazing. Its no wonder there were 13 HOURS of content.  It was a modernization marathon.

The format was very original (the brain child of Lucas Jellma) -He gave each speaker a half hour to present, sort of a business card about their solution, then the attendants needed to choose 2 solutions to learn more about in a later session of 45 minutes. Finally into the wee hours of the night people were given the option of doing a deep dive Hands On on the solution of their choice. It was like technology speed dating.

The solutions presented covered 4 main areas:

1) Forms migration – Jheadstart, Pitss

2) Forms to new platforms / mobile – OraPlayer, YoForms

3) Modernizing forms – Look and Feel project and Forms PJC and Java Beans, AMIS consulting

4) Integration of forms in hybrid environments – OraPlayer, OraFormsFaces

I thought it would be helpful to do a sort of flowchart of the solutions and the modernization challenges they help with.

I think this is the best way to sum up the day.

I also wanted to thank AMIS for an incredible hosting job. It’s not everyday you see such a perfectly organized event. It’s not an easy feat to navigate almost 100 people around the offices and provide them with breakfast, lunch ,snacks, dinner and drinks. They spoiled us

For those of you who attended, let me know what you thought!

Mia

Oracle Forms Extreme Makeover FREE onsite trial of OraPlayer in BENELUX

Want to see your Forms running on a mobile ? or as web-services running from ADF? Want to get a personalized Q&A session with me ? Well now’s your chance !

As most of you know I will be in Netherlands on March 15 for “The Future of Oracle Forms” conference at AMIS consulting. ( You can  Register for it here. )  I thought it would be fun to give away a FREE onsite trial of OraPlayer and a one-on-one Q&A session with me to 3 lucky companies in the Netherlands area who will get to see a LIVE view of their own MODERNIZED  Oracle Forms system running on either a mobile or from ADF. And of course get to meet me

The trial will consist of:

1) Choosing a business scenario from your Oracle Forms system that you would like to run (A scenario for example is: Get credit status”, “Approve user request”, “View Pay Stub”)

2) RECORD the business scenario using the OraPlayer recording toolbar

3) EDIT the Input and Output parameters of the scenario using the OraPlayer deployment wizard to create either a default Mobile UI or ADF data control (API) that calls your pre-recorded forms scenario.

4) RUN your forms business scenario live from either a mobile simulator or from ADF !

If your interested please register here contact me.

In in any case,  I hope everyone can make it to the conference since the presenters are some of the most knowledgeable forms consultants in the world. Even Grant Ronald says so.   See you all there.

You can  Register for the conference here.

Bug of the Week: FRM-41214 – Unable to Run Reports 10g From Forms 11g

Now that I’ve been doing upgrades to 11g R2 for the last 6 months, I am starting to see all types of architectures and have been getting special requests. This week one of my customers asked me to migrate the forms to 11gR2 but to keep the reports on the 10.1.2.3 servers. While doing this, I found this week’s ‘bug of the week‘.  An annoying one to find but fortunately it already has a patch all ready to go.

Running the reports from the Forms from the outset was not a problem. The reports were able to run as long as the two servers shared a common IP subnet. You can check which Oracle Reports bridges are configured and running in the subnet using the rwdiag utility. For example, run the following command:

/bin/rwdiag -findall

You should get a list of all the reports servers that were discovered.

For example (from Oracle):

Broadcast mechanism used to locate servers 
------------------------   
Channel address = 228.5.6.7 Channel port = 14021 
(1) Name = bugupdate : Type = server : Host = strep15.idc.oracle.com 
(2) Name = rep_sup: Type = server : Host =sup-pc.idc.oracle.com 
(3) Name = rep_stre : Type = server : Host = stre.idc.oracle.com 

However, after the report was run without a problem and we could see the PDF in the browser, we got the following popup error message:  FRM-41214 – Unable to run Report . It was quite annoying but, fortunately, we quickly found the bug: Running Reports 10.1.2.3 with Forms 11g.

 

Around the world with Oracle Forms Modernization and ADF in 80 days

Apologies! I have not been posting as often as I’d like, but the Passover holiday season and the Forms conference season have been keeping me busy busy busy! After years of silence at major conferences, Oracle Forms is back baby

Forms sessions at major conference have been making a comeback and in the coming months I will be giving my frequent flyer miles a boost with many international presentations, hands-on and meetings on Oracle Forms modernization and of  course how my solution OraPlayer can help.

So if you want to join me for the modernization world tour here is the agenda (so far…):

MIDDLE EAST – {ISRAEL  -  May 2 Oracle Technology Day – FREE }

First check us out in Israel on May 2nd, where Oracle is holding their famous Oracle “Technology day”,  a full day of all Oracle technologies with tracks ranging from big data to cloud. I’ll be presenting a session about “The Oracle Fusion Development Platform” and running the ADF booth in the demo ground. We are preparing killer ADF demos including ADF on mobile, amazing graphing and visualization capabilities and running Forms business logic from ADF faces UI.

Lessons Learned From Upgrading to Oracle Forms 11g R2 on WebLogic !

You may have heard the rumors about upgrading to Forms 11g R2. How all you need is a quick recompile of your 10g forms. I of course was skeptical since I’ve heard rumors like this before… “It’s just a minor upgrade”,  ”Just run the migration wizard and you’re done”  :)

This time I can happily report that it is TRUE.

Last week we successfully upgraded about 700 forms to 11g R2 in about a WEEK including all installs and infrastructure configuring.

I installed Weblogic 10.1.3.5 and Forms 11g R2 standalone (Installs to download here) on a VM machine of Windows 2008 R2 – 64 bit (See post for how to do the installation) and recompiled our 10.1.2.3 Forms application. I completed all installations, configuration of files, registry editing, signing of the jar files, HEBREW SUPPORT configuration :) and upgraded the 10g application. The whole deal took about 1.5 days and only because I ran into a silly bug. (which I tell you how to avoid in this post)

In general the only issues we ran into while compiling and upgrading the Forms were “nit picky”. 10g did not really care if we had a piece of code that was not supported on the web or small inconsistencies in the code . Now forms 11g gets aggressive.

Bug of the week: Cloning Oracle IAS 10g Forms Standalone – Error “Forms OID integration failed”

The bug of the week this time was found while consulting Orange / Partner.

Thanks to Henrik and Vlad who got stuck while doing a clone of their Oracle Application Server 10g.

It all began easily enough when I sent the the documentation on how to perform a IAS clone  Cloning Oracle Application Server Instances and told them to pay particular attention to 10.5.9 Considerations for Cloning OracleAS Forms Services and 10.5.11 Considerations for Cloning OracleAS Forms and Reports Services Stand alone. Basically you must check the ias.properties file in the source Oracle home, before you run the prepare_clone.pl script to make sure:

• DatabaseManagedClusterSupport=true
• installType=Business

They did just as the Oracle documentation above requested but when they got to the command:

perl clone.pl ORACLE_HOME=<currentOracle Home> ORACLE_HOME_NAME=OraHome_clone -instance ias-clone -ias_admin_old_pwd <old_password>   -ias_admin_new_pwd <new_password>

First they happily got the message

               [INFO] The cloning of OraHome_clone was successful.

But no celebrating yet …   About 2 minutes later they got errors:

Oracle Forms Performance Monitoring is Now a Two Horse Race – Free Webinar

Well it seems that things have begun heating up in the Oracle Forms monitoring world. In only one year we went from no real-end-user performance monitoring tools for Oracle Forms to two Oracle Real User Experience Insight – RUEI and SharePath (Correlsense). Its great to see more monitoring tools are starting to cater to the unique needs of Oracle Forms system administrators with comprehensive solutions. I have written posts recently on the new features in Oracle Forms 11g R2 that support RUEI. My posts have apparently caused some noise and made me a sort of forms monitoring celebrity.  I guess that’s why I was asked to make a guest appearance in a webinar on March 27 called “Five Keys for Performance Management of Oracle Forms and E-Business Suite.”

In the webinar, I will drill down into all things we must consider when looking for a performance monitoring solution and the unique challenges that exist for monitoring forms systems. I’m happy to see more companies providing smart solutions for Oracle Forms based systems.

If you want to join us register here.

Mia

Bug of the week: Error with Font Mapping Hebrew in JRE 1.6

My annoying bug of the week came when I tried to fix the font mapping of our Forms 11g upgraded system. During the 11g upgrade, we moved from Jnitiator to JRE and since we are a Hebrew application all the font switched to David. I did everything according to the letter – mapfonts = yes change the fonts in the fontconfig.properties.src but it seemed no matter what I did the font in JRE 1.6 was David instead of the font assigned in the application or in the registry.dat file.

UNTIL I found this Oracle support note
After Upgrading to Either JRE 1.5.0_XX or 1.6.0_XX the Default Font for Hebrew Characters has Changed from “Arial” to “David” [ID 972975.1]

The work around is quite simple but a bit annoying:

1) Copy fontconfig.properties.src and rename to fontconfig.properties

Oracle Application Development Tools: Statement of Direction: Verdict: Alive, On Life Support, Six Feet Under

Hey everyone, so the Oracle Statement of Direction 2012 for application development tools is out. Basically its the one time a year when I hold my breath to see what they will say about Forms.  And the verdict is drum roll please ……  LIFE  for forms. The other tools did not fair so well.

But the basic rundown is …

Oracle Forms – ALIVE AND WELL (for now

Oracle has no plan to discontinue support of Oracle Forms. Furthermore, a new version of  Forms, Oracle Forms 12c, is planned for delivery as a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c.

Oracle Reports – ON LIFE SUPPORT

The last major changes to Oracle Reports were in the 10g release. We are planning to release Oracle Reports 12c as part of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c. However, Oracle’s strategic reporting solution is now BI Publisher. While Oracle’s support of Oracle Reports will extend well into the future, customers should begin planning their migration to BI Publisher.

Oracle Designer – SIX FEET UNDER

HELP: What do I do with my Oracle Forms Applications Today? Modernize, Migrate or Go Mobile?

As most of you know by now, since October Grant Ronald (Oracle Forms and JDeveloper Senior Principal Product Manager) and I have been campaigning to bring Forms customers out of hiding and to try and help them modernize their systems.

I personally made it my mission to make sure Oracle Forms developers will no longer be the forgotten people.

We already had two VERY successful Forms modernization days in Israel and UK with hopefully Germany, Netherlands, Montreal and NY to follow this year. I am also hoping to see Forms sessions in Oracle World and ODTUG Kscope conference (I’ll try my best but I can’t promise ).

I’d like to welcome our friends at ODTUG to the campaign. They are sponsoring a webinar to address all the questions that Forms developers have been asking on blogs and in our linkedin group discussions.

On March 29 our webinar has one goal in mind -> To give ALL  Oracle Forms developers the essential information they need to make  informed decisions on what to do with their Forms investment. Checkout Grants blog for more information.

Grant and I will tell it LIKE IT IS, with real world examples, practical tips and a killer forms to mobile demo.
Don’t miss out on the FREE webinar, register NOW!

I’d love to hear from you – what would you like to learn about during the webinar? I’m open to questions, suggestions and feedback.
Get your questions in early and Grant and I will try to address them in the webinar!

Well the webinar was a great success!

Thanks Grant and Lauren and all the ODTUG gang for inviting me to do it.

You can download the slides here: Help What do I do with my forms system today?

You can also get a recording of the Webinar if you are a ODTUG member here if you have any trouble send me an email to info @ oraplayer.com