Oracle Forms has been around for a long time. When I started writing computer programs over 20 years ago, I was lucky enough to get to work on an Oracle project where I got to learn all about Oracle Forms 2.3 and Oracle Database 5. Going forward, I worked with most versions of Oracle Forms together with Oracle Designer and some Oracle Reports, and various versions of the Oracle database. I primarily worked on custom development, and so gathered a wealth of Oracle Forms and PL/SQL knowledge.
In 2003, I first learned about a tool called Project Marvel—which is now known as Oracle Application Express, or simply APEX—even before it became an official Oracle product. I was working for Oracle Consulting, and at that time almost every job in Oracle Consulting required Java skills. I was very relieved to find that the skill set for developing APEX applications was primarily PL/SQL. Re-training in APEX is relatively easy as APEX is a declarative framework with numerous wizards for creating screens, which can then be extended using PL/SQL—much the same as the Oracle Forms. There are some fundamental differences in the way the two tools operate. For example, Oracle Forms maintains a continuous connection with the Oracle Database and uses pessimistic locking, whereas APEX only connects to the database when rendering or posting a page and uses optimistic locking.
I joined a project in 2003 for a large law enforcement agency that was actually the primary beta site for APEX. I spent four years on that project, where we were very successful in manually converting several legacy Oracle Forms applications into a suite of APEX applications. That suite now runs the majority of the police departments operations. During my tenure, I trained over 20 Oracle Forms developers in APEX and on an average the developers were productively developing APEX applications within two weeks.
Then in 2007, I transferred from Oracle Consulting to Server Technologies to become the Product Manager for Oracle Application Express. I worked very closely with the APEX Development Team on our Forms Conversion components. Our key objective was to provide a valuable tool that "assists" you in converting Oracle Forms applications. Our intention was never to provide a 100% conversion tool whereby you enter some source files, press a few buttons, and immediately get a production-ready application. Instead, our focus was on automatically converting the components that we can and then providing tracking capabilities through the annotations, which you will learn in detail in this book.
With respect to Oracle Forms, this tool has been utilized extensively to solve business requirements for decades. It is a very robust, high-performance tool that is still being developed and will continue to be supported for years to come. In fact, Oracle Forms 11g was recently released as a part of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.
Converting from Oracle Forms to any other technology, including APEX, will require significant time and effort; and should be treated as a project. And that is where this book will prove invaluable—to help you understand not only how the APEX Forms Conversion tool works, but also how to plan and execute your conversion project. This book walks you through the conversion of a sample application and explains the various features. Moreover, it also provides an excellent insight into how you can get the most from using this tool. Douwe Pieter has written a great book that is easy to follow and will definitely help any Oracle Forms developers to better understand what is involved with converting their applications to APEX.
David Peake
Oracle Application Express Product Manager
Server Technologies, Database Tools
Oracle USA Inc.