Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Collaborate 13 in Denver, CO. Never in a million years did I expect the conference to take place in a snow storm in the middle of April. If I would have known I would not have brought my 3 month old son
On Tuesday, April 9, OraPlayer co-hosted a networking event for the Oracle Forms community along with Greg Opie from ECS Team, and Martin Disterheft from PITSS. The event was a Happy Hour cocktail under the theme “The Next Generation of Oracle Development: What should we do with our Oracle Forms?”We even had the honor of hosting Shaun O’Brien, Oracle ADF Product Manager who joined us to present Oracle’s development vision going forward. We felt it was a great success. We had over 65 attendants — which is quite an impressive crowd considering Collaborate is not a traditional development conference and we had lots of competition with other user group events at the same time! The crowd listened to three great technical sessions featuring ADF and ADF Mobile development, including two customer case studies, and Shaun’s presentation.
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.
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.
If you missed it, you can download the slides here and view all the demos here.
Don’t forget to vote on Oracle Forms to Mobile Poll on OTN.
Watch this space for more webinar announcements in the near future. We also have an exciting announcement in the bag!
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The world has gone mobile.
So why haven’t our Oracle Forms system caught up?
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 asADF. 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:
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. Continue reading →
For 6 years now I have been consulting to Oracle developer how to get the most “bang for their buck” and maximize their investment in Oracle Forms technologies. It started simply with changing forms look and feel and redesigns then I moved to incorporating java objects until finally I ended up with a pretty advanced set of tools to help Oracle Forms developers.
That’s when I decided to create a new startup called to provide advanced solutions to help Oracle Forms / ERP customers deal with today’s IT opportunities and challenges. Continue reading →
