We often find a great deal of confusion amongst long-time Oracle users about their past investment in Oracle Forms. A lot of this confusion is generated by those with an interest in your organization re-writing your applications.
Let’s be clear up front. You do NOT need to re-write your Oracle Forms applications. Oracle has committed to new releases and continued development of this technology.
That doesn’t mean you might choose to change technologies for business reasons. It simply means that you do not have to if there is no pressing reason.
Below are direct quotes from Oracle’s Official Statement of Direction (Document ID: 2009262.1):
Oracle continues its commitment to Oracle Forms. New releases are being planned and new features and other improvements are currently being reviewed. New releases are planned to include some of the following, as well as many others:
- Design-time productivity improvements
- Performance improvements
- Forms Standalone Launcher improvements
- Support for calling REST
- New and enhanced object properties
- New runtime UI features
- New and improved integration with other products and technologies
- Easy Forms instance provisioning in Oracle Cloud
- Integration with Developer Cloud Service (DevCS)
- Enhanced security features
- Support for new Java versions
- Support for new operating systems
Oracle Forms continues to be a core component in many Oracle products.
Users of Oracle Forms versions older than the current release should immediately begin working on a plan to upgrade to the latest as soon as possible. Upgrading to the latest version will help to ensure that your system has the latest security, stability, and performance updates available. Upgrading will also expose access to the very latest new features of the current version and all previous versions. Moving to the latest version also offers the use of newer operating systems and newer Oracle product versions.
Once on the latest version, it is further recommended that application developers take advantage of new features and technologies that can help enhance and modernize outdated applications. Remember that Oracle Forms offers many unique features not found in most html-based web applications. By upgrading and modernizing your existing Oracle Forms investment, end-user can work more efficiently and productively. More importantly, by retaining and modernizing and improving your existing applications, the high cost of a complete application rewrite using other technologies can be avoided.
You can learn more at: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/developer-tools/forms.html
Oracle Forms continue to provide a powerful and long-established technology for building enterprise grade applications quickly and efficiently. The added benefit is that with knowledge of SQL and PL/SQL, Oracle Forms is relatively easy to learn!
Remember, DesTech is here to help you every step of the way.
