Running Webforms without Oracle JInitiator americas cup win 2682133k1

Running Webforms without Oracle JInitiator

A few weeks ago one of my customers told me that he lost a sales opportunity because the customer who he was trying to sell his software too had problems convincing his system administrator to install JInitiator. And as we all know it’s often quite a challenge to convince a system admin to install something he does not know and doesn’t want to know. In the real world it is much easier to convince them that the SUN JPI is needed to be installed for your application. In my opinion a loss which was not needed since you can run Webforms without JInitiator using the SUN JPI. How did I know? Well I had read the blog of Wilfred van der Deijl. He has a good blog site called OraTransplant in which he had posted an article on how to use dynamic versioning of Sun JPI and Oracle Forms.
My goal was to use the static version of the Sun JPI version 1.5.0.11 My customer sells validated software which complies with FDA regulations therefore I did not think it would be a good idea to use dynamic versioning since JPI 1.6 is not supported yet by Oracle.
So what to do:

Make a backup of your formsweb.cfg file just to make sure you never know.
Make sure that the baseHTML, baseHTMLjinitiator and  baseHTMLjpi parameters point to your basejpi.htm
EG:
# System parameter: default base HTML file
baseHTML=basejpi.htm
# System parameter: base HTML file for use with JInitiator client
baseHTMLjinitiator=basejpi.htm
# System parameter: base HTML file for use with Sun’s Java Plug-In
baseHTMLjpi=basejpi.htm

Change the jpi_download_page to the proper URL. The different download sites can be found here
Change the jpi_classid to the proper version of the Java Plugin
Change the jpi_codebase to the proper place the file is located. In my case I used the download URL of sun but this could also be your local server.
As last make sure that the jpi_mimetype points to the correct version

EG:
# Page displayed to users to allow them to download Sun’s Java Plugin.
# Sun’s Java Plugin is typically used for non-Windows clients.
# (NOTE: you should check this page and possibly change the settings)
jpi_download_page=http://java.sun.com/update/1.5.0/jinstall-1_5_0_11-windows-i586.cab
# Parameter related to the version of the Java Plugin
jpi_classid=clsid:CAFEEFAC-0015-0000-0000-ABCDEFFEDCBA
# Parameter related to the version of the Java Plugin
jpi_codebase=http://java.sun.com/update/1.5.0/jinstall-1_5_0_11-windows-i586.cab#version=1,5,0,11
# Parameter related to the version of the Java Plugin
jpi_mimetype=application/x-java-applet;version=1.5.0.11

Save the file and you are up and running. Note that when you do not have JPI 1.5.0.11 installed on your machine you will be prompted to install it the first time you launch your application in the same way you are prompted to install JInitiator the first time you launch your application.
Just for the record, I tested this using Oracle forms 10.1.2 running in IE60 a bit and as Wilfred noticed that there are known issues with 1.5.0 I will see if there are issues running 1.5.0.11.

9 Comments

  1. Fahd Mirza April 14, 2009
  2. Will Mehigan May 11, 2007
  3. Mark February 27, 2007
  4. Jacco Landlust February 27, 2007
  5. Marcos Claver February 23, 2007
  6. Mark February 23, 2007
  7. Marcos Claver February 22, 2007
  8. Wilfred February 22, 2007
  9. Wilfred February 22, 2007