I’ve kept pretty busy since coming back from Collaborate 2013 last month, working on new solutions for my company OraPlayer and getting ready for Kscope 2013.

One of these new solutions is a LIVE DEMO of our Oracle Forms to ADF Mobile solution. We have developed a small Android app that customers can download onto their own mobile devices to see the power of our solution first hand. We have done a “Pumped up” version of the Oracle Forms Summit store training application, where the ADF Mobile front end (including graphs and maps) runs Oracle Forms sitting on an Amazon Cloud, via OraPlayer. If all goes well we may be able to offer hands-ons to developers interested in getting their feet wet with ADF Mobile for Forms during Kscope 2013.

We are looking for a few good men / women to do a bit of beta testing for us. If you’re interested in ADF Mobile or Forms modernization solutions, we’d be happy if you could help by participating in our Beta testing program!

Here’s how to become a beta tester:
• You must have an Android device
• Then click here to fill out the Contact Form.
• Include one or two sentences on why you’d like to do the beta test (for example: I’m a Forms developer, I’m looking for a Mobile Solution, I am a techy geek who loves playing with new technologies).

We’ll get back to any relevant applicants, and we will send you the link so you can give it a try and send us your feedback before our general release. We will be sending a small token of our appreciation to all participants, so if you like FREE GIFTS apply now.

Please feel free to spread the word!

If you missed the event or would like to revisit the presentations, you can find them below:

• Martin Disterheft from PITSS presented the introduction as well as the session “Protect Your Current Investment in Oracle Forms and Reports” — you can view this presentation by clicking here.
• Next up, I presented my newest session “Run Your Oracle Forms on the Mobile using ADF” —click here to see the slides from my presentation. To view the demo “Oracle Forms for ADF Mobile” from my session, click here.
• Greg Opie from ECS followed with another customer case study, “ECS Successful Modernization with ADF” — you can see the slides here.
• To round up the evening, Shaun O’Brien from Oracle presented “The Future of Oracle Development.”

 We hope to replicate the success of this event at future conferences to help move this Forms community into the ADF world. Our next stop is Kscope 13 in June. In the meantime, to find out more about the event as well as Oracle Forms modernization, contact us.

The most notable of which is the event the Oracle Forms Community will be hosting with OraPlayer, PITSS and ECSTeam under the theme

“The Next Generation of Oracle Development: What should we do with our Oracle Forms?”

It will be a cocktail “Happy Hour“ with lots of networking, some sessions from top Oracle Forms experts and a Q&A session with the Oracle Product manager. Come mingle with other Forms and EBS users and meet our experts.

Hope to see you all on Tuesday, April 9 from 6:00 pm – 7:00pm in the Exhibit Hall, Booth #1081 (PITSS America and ECSTeam, Next to Oracle)

Presentations include:

• Protect Your Current Investment in Oracle Forms and Reports, Martin Disterheft, PITSS
• Run Your Oracle Forms on the Mobile using ADF, Mia Urman, OraPlayer
• Successful Modernization with ADF and ADF Mobile, Greg Opie, ECSTeam
• The Future of Oracle Development, Shaun O’Brien, Oracle

Register for the Free event here !
I’m lucky that I will be presenting a session called,  Moving Forward with Oracle Forms: What Now? What’s Next?, at 12:15 pm on Wednesday,  April 10, so those of you who’ll have a few at the networking event will still be able to make it . My session will provide Oracle Forms / EBS users with the essential information on how to move forward with their Forms investment.  I will discuss how to modernize existing systems by integrating or migrating them to Oracle’s next generation technologies. We will explore   modernization options, creating integrated systems, and running Oracle Forms via ADF Mobile. We will also  review how to plan for the future with regard to Oracle development technologies.

Besides my session there are several other interesting  Forms to ADF sessions.  On Monday, April 8 at 2:30 pm  there is Building Hybrid Oracle Forms and ADF Applications by Gavin Woods and Martin Disterheft from PITSS.  On Tuesday, April 9 at 10:45 am we have Oracle ADF &JDeveloper for Forms Developers by John King from King Training Resources. And on Monday, April 8 at 9:45 am  Oracle ADF – What it is and why it is important to you will be held by Shay Shmeltzer, Senior Group Manager at Oracle.  These sessions along with my own,  Moving Forward with Oracle Forms: What Now? What’s Next? , should give you a good overview of where Oracle is going with their Oracle Forms directions.

In addition to these I’d suggest attending these sessions for a good introduction to the next generation Oracle development tools

• Getting Started with ADF —Monday, April 8, 11:00 am, Chad Thompson, Zirous, Inc.
• APEX – A Training Outline — Wednesday, April 10, 3:00 pm, Patrick Cimolini, Patrick International APEX Consulting
• Developing On-device Mobile Applications with Oracle ADF Mobile — Tuesday, April 9, 8:00 am, Joe Huang, Oracle

Finally these sessions are a good introduction to ADF development for EBS users

• Oracle ADF for OAF Developers — Monday, April 8, 3:45 pm, Shay Shmeltzer, Oracle
• Develop, Integrate, and Use: Oracle ADF with Oracle E-Business Suite the SOA way — Monday, April 8, 2:30 pm, also delivered by Shay Shmeltzer of Oracle

You can pre-register for these events on the Collaborate 13 IOUG website. Click here for details.

And as in any conference the most interesting part is of course the exhibition ground. There you come and drop by Booth 1080 to learn more about Oracle Forms modernization from our partners, ECSTeam and PITSS.  Whether it be upgrading to Forms 11g, migrating to ADF/APEX, running Forms on mobile/tablet environments, or improving system performance, we can help you solve ALL your Oracle Forms challenges. You’ll probably find me hanging out there so stop by to say hello.

In any case, I’d be happy to meet any of you one-on-one to do a demo or have a consultation on Forms to Mobile at Collaborate 13.  To set up a meeting, contact us.

I look forward to seeing you all in Denver at Collaborate 13!

Last Thursday, on February 7, we ran our first ADF Mobile ODTUG webinar, where we showed a live demo of running Oracle Forms on the iPhone using an ADF Mobile UI. You can download the slides and see the demos here or download the full webinar recording from ODTUG if you are a member here.  

Don’t forget to vote on the Oracle Forms to ADF Mobile Poll on OTN.

Creating the above demo was a truly exciting project for us. We had developed in ADF in the past but had never ventured into the world of iOS or mobile development. To our surprise working in ADF mobile came very naturally us and in only a matter of days we had developed small but fully functional application.  The development experience in Jdeveloper was very similar, even though the resulting UI would be mobile.

In planning our demo, it was important for us to show the entire development cycle and not just a demo of the final product. We began development by creating the sample application that we posted on the blog Oracle Forms to ADF Mobile: The Ultimate Modernization Challenge. The response we got was incredible. We got suggestions from customers and Oracle Directors alike on what they would like to see as a proof of concept in the follow up demos.  So with guidance from 2 Oracle gurus, Denis Tyrell, Director of Oracle ADF UI product management and Grant Ronald Director of product management for Oracle Forms and ADF, we set out to create a demo that could be the best of both worlds—leverage the existing Oracle Forms investment without redevelopment while taking advantage of the incredible visual elements and features the mobile world provides when using ADF Mobile framework.

This project also really helped us understand the meaning of modernization.  At first, as Forms developers we were just so happy and shocked to see the existing forms system running on the iPhone, we did not even think about how the system looked. It was only when Denis said, “wouldn’t the users want to look at a map and not at that plain grey address field?”  that we understood what it would mean to deploy forms on a mobile. When we expose Oracle Forms to the mobile it’s not enough to run the same existing form in its same design just on the mobile. We must fully understand the functionality needed in the mobile application and make use of the  added features ADF Mobile has to offer. This allowed us to take the existing Summit application and, for example, add location based mapping, and SMS functionality as well as graphing capabilities that did not exist in the original form system.

Once the demo was completed it was great to hear from Grant Ronald, who asked all the tough questions from a Forms developer point of view. What would happen if data in the form changed? What would happen if the fmx changed? Could we do inserts over the mobile UI as well?  This helped us come up with additional demos that showcased the full power of running Oracle Forms as a webservice using an ADF Mobile UI on an iPhone.

It all began when the Oracle Forms product manager Michael Ferrante  started a poll on the OTN Oracle Forms Forum asking

 

If a mobile option was available for Oracle Forms with the use of ADF Mobile to develop an appropriate front-end, would you be interested in the solution?

I welcome this initiative by Oracle! It looks like a promising step towards Oracle providing migration / integration solutions for Oracle Forms and I think we should all vote and let our community voice be heard.

You can cast your VOTE  Here  

To learn more on Oracle Forms Modernization to ADF and ADF Mobile you can checkout:

Webinars - ODTUGs FREE webinar series for Oracle Forms to ADF and ADF Mobile

• Take Your Oracle Forms on the Road Using ADF Mobile - with guest star Denis Tyrell, Oracle Director and overall ADF Mobile Guru - Register HERE

• ADF Essentials in 60 Minutes for Forms Developers – Madi Serban, PITSS  - Register Here 

Blog Posts

• Oracle Forms to ADF Mobile: The Ultimate Modernization Challenge Oracle Forms Community Blog – Mia Urman

• Accessing an Oracle Forms application from an iPhone! Grant Ronald Blog’s – Oracle Director of Product Management

• ADF Mobile applications built on Oracle Forms! ADF Mobile Blog - Denis Tyrell – Oracle Director

Lets hope this is just the start!

In our constant effort to show how we can achieve Oracle Forms modernization without re-development we decided to rise to the ultimate challenge and show how we can run Oracle Forms from the newly released ADF Mobile.

In our demo we decided to use the traditional Oracle Forms Summit application as it was developed by Oracle as “go to” demo application  to demonstrate Forms functionality, version upgrades and even Forms redevelopment  as ADF. In our demo we show the “insert order”  business process of the Oracle Forms Summit application running with an ADF Mobile UI on an iPhone using OraPlayer.

The final product can be seen here:

We will be presenting the full process in detail in a FREE webinar hosted by ODTUG called Take Your Oracle Forms on the Road Using ADF Mobile,  I will be presenting alongside Denis Tyrell, Oracle Director and overall ADF Mobile guru.  Register for FREE here

In creating this demo we did not do any redevelopment of the Forms system functionality. We are running the existing Oracle Forms business process on the Forms server using OraPlayer from ADF Mobile. Although it sounds challenging this was achieved in 4 simple steps:

Step 1: Define the business process you want to run on a mobile 

Oracle Forms screens are mainly suited for massive data entry and are jam-packed of items and not easily translatable to mobile screens. It was not our intention to replicate the entire Forms system with our solution. This would be both impractical and  in most cases unnecessary since applications running on mobile platforms are usually only a subset of the full system. It is therefore critical, as the first step, that we determined the specific system processes we wished to run on the mobile.  This included:

1) Understanding the business process we want to translate to the small screen. In our demo we created a  flowchart of the business process to assist us (see below)

2) Selecting what data we needed to get from the user in order to run the business process. Including identifying all fields necessary to have on our new mobile UI in order to insert a new order.

3) Identifying the expected results of the application. Including all output data and messages we must receive from the Forms system to understand if the process was run successfully. As well as error messages to explain if and why the process has failed.

The full business process for the “Insert Order Process” can be seen in this flow chart:

The process can be summed up as follows:

1.  Login to the System
2.  Insert a new order to an existing customer ID.
3.  If the customer exists, and order was inserted successfully then return the order ID.
4.  If the customer does not exist, then create a new customer and then insert the order. If successful return the order ID.
5.  If any steps of the process fails return the Forms error messages and text.

Step 2: Record and deploy the Forms business processes using OraPlayer

Once the business process was selected in step 1, we recorded the scenario as it was performed in the Oracle Forms system using the OraPlayer Recording Toolbar (similar to recording a macro). Any items that were selected, entered or manipulated in our recording will be available as fields /actions  in the new ADF Mobile application.

We can see an example of  the recording process in this demo where we recorded the “Creating a new order for existing customer scenario“ for our demo here 

Once the recording was completed and deployed, a Java API to run the Forms process was created automatically using the OraPlayer Web Wizard.

Step 3: In Jdeveloper create a new ADF Mobile project with ADF DataControls and AMX Pages (the New UI)

Once we had our Oracle Forms scenario ready, we began to create the Mobile front end of our application. In Jdeveloper, we first created a new ADF Mobile project. We then created the ADF Datacontrol based on the OraPlayer Java API (automatically generated in step 2)  to give us the basis for binding the ADF Mobile page items to the Forms system items.  This was easily done with the wizard based development in Jdeveloper.

We then used the visual editor of Jdeveloper to create the ADF Mobile AMX pages. In our demo we created 3 insert pages: Login, insert order and create customer as well as 3 results pages : 2 for error handling and the other for successful results of the process.

The beauty of ADF Mobile is, that we develop the pages once using the drag and drop and WYSIWYG editing features, and we can deploy them on any mobile platform. Upon deployment it is rendered as a native application on whatever platform we chose. So we can benefit from  the “design once deploy to many environments”  feature of ADF Mobile that Oracle promises.

Step 4: Create task flow of the pages and add validation / navigation code

Finally after we created the necessary pages, we designed the navigation flow between the pages and added the validations that should occur upon success or failure of events on the page. In our demo the taskflow is critical since we perform navigation based on analyzing the responses we get from the Forms server (such as error messages like frm-xxxx or ora-xxx) and only then navigate to the correct page.

You can see our taskflow diagram here:

In summary, by using OraPlayer in conjunction with  the powerful ADF Mobile framework, we are able to develop modernized mobile applications without redevelopment.

Using this method, we can create mobile applications in no time for a multitude of use cases and complex business processes found in our existing Oracle Forms systems. Also, with OraPlayer’s ability to retrieve all Forms messages, we can ensure that the new mobile application can behave just like the current Forms systems does.

We will be presenting the full process in detail in a FREE webinar hosted by ODTUG called Take Your Oracle Forms on the Road Using ADF Mobile,  I will be presenting alongside Denis Tyrell, Oracle Director and overall ADF Mobile guru. We will have all new demos with the latest ADF Mobile bells and whistles such as maps and gauges to show off.

To receive more information email us with this form: [contact-form]

Oracle Forms 11.1.2.1 Patch 1 Released it can be downloaded here:  Oracle Forms and Reports 11g Release 2 - Contains Oracle Forms and Reports 11gR2 (11.1.2.1.0)

This release can be applied as a patch on top of 11.1.2.0 or as a full installation. Be sure to also review the product Certification Guide for the latest updates on certified configurations

If you want to see full certification information for all platforms and java client versions you can check these out.

• Certification of Oracle Forms 11g R2 patch 1 can be found here
• Certification of Oracle Forms 11g R2 can be found here
• Certification of Oracle Forms 11g R1 can be found here
• Certification of Oracle Forms 10g R2 can be found here

In general I get 2 types of errors from customers when running with Hebrew reports:

Firstly,  instead of seeing Hebrew / Arabic characters when a report is run they see various symbols @#!$%^&*.  When this happens most people decide to replace the uifont.ali file that comes with Reports 11g R2 with the uifont.ali file that supported BIDI characters from 10g systems. Once they do this replacement they get the second error which is error message REP-56048: Engine rwEng-0 crashed and the report server crashes when they run a Report containing Hebrew characters.

After see many SR’s on the subject I decided I would write a handy whitepaper for you all on how to configure Hebrew reports on 11g R2 with ease.

The guide to Hebrew reports for Windows can be downloaded here

I know developers have been getting similar errors running Arabic reports so this may help them as well. If it works for Arabic please let me know in the comments section. Thanks

I was honored to be accepted as a speaker this year but as I am due to give brith on Dec. 9 it would be a bit problematic for me to attend. As those of you who caught my session at Oracle Open World can attest, me in my third trimester is quite a sight up on that podium.  But just because I can’t make it to the conference doesn’t mean I won’t do my usual and point out great sessions that I’d love to attend. I will have to live vicariously through all the participants who will be attending the sessions and update us using the social media venues.

Also I want to give a special thanks to Luc Bors and the Amis team for agreeing to present my session in my absence.

Monday – This is by far the best day for Forms developers looking to learn about Oracle’s next generation technologies and how to move forward with their existing systems.

I’d start with the KEYNOTE session: The Future of Development for Oracle Fusion – from Desktop, to Mobile, to Cloud by Duncan Mills. He is a great speaker and after attending this session at OOW I felt it was a great overview on Oracle’s vision moving forward.  Next I’d go to Frank Nimphius session (he’s got quite a sense of humor in his presentations) on Oracle JDeveloper and ADF 12c New Features . Next I’d have a hard time deciding what session to go since both What a Server Administrator Needs to Know About ADF by Sten Vesterli, Oracle ACE Director and Providing a Multi-Platform Mobile Solution with Oracle ADF Mobile by Luc Bors – AMIS Services seem really interesting. In the end I’d probably go mobile.  Then I’d be presenting my session. Survival of the Fittest: How to Evolve Your Oracle Forms to the 21st Century - But I’m excited that Luc will be standing in for me. His background on Oracle Forms coupled with his deep knowledge of the next generation ADF and ADF Mobile tools, I could not ask for better. We have also prepared with him a great demo to run an Oracle Forms system with ADF mobile on a iPhone . Its not to be missed!

Then I’d go to Grant’s session on Implementing Fusion Applications User Experience Design Patterns with Oracle ADF . I always enjoy his sessions since I end up learning new things even when the topic is familiar to me. Then I’d top off the day with John King What’s Old is New Again: Oracle Forms 11gR2 New Features. This is a great session that I think actually won best developer session in the ODTUG Kscope conference this year.

Tuesday – This is a day filled with sessions by world-class ADF masterminds to drill down into more advanced ADF concepts.

I’d start off the day with the Development Tools Roundtable with Andrew Clarke from Logica. Its a good way to put into context all the tools available now to Oracle developers and when to use what.

Then I’d dive into to the many ADF sessions covering all concepts such as:

• Building Highly Reusable ADF Taskflows  and What You Need to Know About Java Server Faces to be Successful with Oracle ADF by Steven Davelaar,  the mastermind behind JHeadstart
• In a Nutshell: The ADF UI Shell by Chris Muir, the fearless leader of the ADF EMG.
• The Ultimate Sales Pitch for ADF – An Open Discussion on Strategic Importance and Practical Value - Chris Muir, Oracle Employee ACE – Oracle
• Improve Your ADF Fusion Application’s Response Time by as Much as 70% - Frank Houweling – AMIS
• And just for a chance this session sounds really interesting Building a Private Cloud with Oracle Fusion Middleware (Including Forms/Reports!) and Enterprise Manager - Roger Freixa – Oracle
• ADF Development from the Trenches - Aino Andriessen – AMIS Services

Wednesday – For me this would be an all handson day! I’d do the ADF masterclass beginning with Chris Muirs 1/2 day ADF Fundamentals and then do the ADF Mobile handson. You can register to them here

• One Size Doesn’t Fit All – Oracle ADF Architecture Fundamentals 
• Mobile Development Hands-on Labs - For more information on this you can checkout Grants’ blog.

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Well that’s just my 2 cents on the UKOUG 2012 agenda. If you want you can get a view of Grant Ronalds “ADF  highlights” of the conference here on the weblogic blog.

I hope all of you who are in the area choose to attend and have a great conference. You can add comments on the highlights for you!