Oracle Forms: Productivity with new choices

Last Monday we had a KC meeting, where we discussed the latest features of Oracle Forms (OF).

Basically these features break up into two categories:

• Oracle Forms Pl/Sql features
• Oracle Forms Java features

Oracle Forms ‘Native’ PlSql features.

The following Pl/Sql features were discussed

• Sortable blocks
  With a simple Pl/Sql library you can make multi-record table-layout blocks sortable.
• Tree-Shuttle
  With a simple Pl/Sql library you can make a shuttle component. The 2 sides of the shuttle are trees.
• MS/Outlook Tabbed bar
  With a set of buttons and some library procedures you can easily make a bar like in MS/Outlook

Oracle  Forms Java features

The following OF Java features were discussed:

• Webutil library
  An out of the box library of Oracle itself for integrating OF applications with the client PC.

• PJC’s- Pluggable Java components
  By extending the java representations of the OF GUI items new functionality can be added to the standard GUI items. As an example, a PJC for displaying a label and an icon on a button was shown. This PJC is an extension of a PJC developed by Oleg Tishchenko which is an extension of an PJC developed by Duncan Mills which is an extension of the button developed by “Steve Button” J
  Recently François Degrelle launched an excellent site where you can find a lot of examples of PJC’s amongst them the PJC buttons by Oleg c.s.. (http://forms.pjc.bean.over-blog.com)

• Enhanced Java Bean Support
  With this feature of Oracle Forms you can include java beans quite easily in OF. As an example the integration of charts with OF was shown. The charts were developed with JFreeChart; an OS library developed by David Gilbert (www.jfree.org)
• Java importer
  With this functionality java business logic can be executed on the middle-tier by OF. As an example a zip and a unzip java utility was called from OF.

With this post you’ll find the presentation and examples.