The Future of Forms – 15th of May – Nieuwegein, The Netherlands

Sporting a selection of the world’s best known speakers in the area of Oracle Forms and Forms modernization – on Tuesday 15th May AMIS will host an all day event around Forms, aimed at application architects and lead developers. During this event, we will discuss and demonstrate the most relevant options for moving Forms applications (and Forms developers) to the future. Registration for this event is free – the capacity is limited. See this link for the full program, the abstracts for all the presentations and the biographies of the speakers: http://www.amis.nl/theme/amis/uploadedFiles/PDF/Future%20of%20Forms%20EN%20DAG.pdf.

The Future of Forms

Many organizations embarked on Oracle Forms at some point in the ’90s. Terminal-based (3.0 and before), Client/Server or using the Forms applet in a Web Browser. And in many of those organizations, the application(s) built in Forms are still an important factor. Key applications providing core back office functionality for a fairly highly skilled end user community.

Change is coming though. From the business and the end users of these applications, requirements are stated for more modern, more user friendly and more intuitive user interfaces – that for some functionality should be available on mobile devices as well. And this functionality should be delivered in an agile way: flexible with a high rate of quickly applied changes.

The technology arena has also undergone some dramatic changes. Client/Server is largely gone and use of Applets is also somewhat frowned upon. A traditional data-driven user interface (CRUD-style) is not acceptable anymore. HTML (Web 2.0) UIs for browser and mobile is much more in vogue. And of course the application needs to interact with the Service Oriented Architecture. Forms is no longer the strategic development platform at Oracle for applications with a User Interface (ADF has taken over that role). However, Oracle is still evolving Forms and Forms 11g today offers many options for creating a fairly modern and advanced user interface.
Abandoning Forms is not really an option for the short term. The investment needed to completely replace the Forms application is simply too big and time it will take too long to even seriously consider. Besides, there is generally no real need to completely drop the Forms application. The business requirements can frequently addressed for only selected areas of functionality and specific groups of users, using a variety of methods – most of them allowing for a hybrid scenario where Forms and other technologies are blended together:
•    evolve/improve/”pimp’ existing Forms that continue to run as Forms with modern look and feel
•    integrate Forms in a SOA & BPM environment
•    embed Forms in Web 2.0 – UI integration with ADF, .NET or other ‘modern’ web technologies
•    wrap Forms as service (publish business logic from Forms and reuse with new UIs or WebServices on top of them)
•    render Forms to new platforms (render existing Forms as they are to new platforms such as Mobile browsers)
•    migrate (selected) Forms to a new technology
•    rebuilt (selected) Forms in a new technology

During this event, several experts will present and demonstrate their vision and possible solutions – including Wilfred vd Deijl with OraFormsFaces, Mia Urman with OraPlayer, and Steven Davelaar demonstrating JHeadstart, as well as Francois Degrelle showing Pluggable Java Components and the Forms Look & Feel project, Oliver Tickell with YoForms and Madi Serban presenting the migration solutions from PITSS. Lucas Jellema kicks off with a presentation on the history, evolution and future of Forms and its role in an enterprise architecture and the day is concluded with a panel discussion with all the experts, discussing the future of Forms. After dinner, for real “techies”, there is option of technical deep dive & hands-on sessions.

The following document provides in depth details on program for this day: http://www.amis.nl/theme/amis/uploadedFiles/PDF/Future%20of%20Forms%20EN%20DAG.pdf.

Registration for this all- day event can be done via: http://www.amis.nl/event-inschrijving/?event_id=41.

Evening Session – Technical Deep Dive and Hands-On

In the evening, a second event is staged, where in technical deep dive and hands-on sessions, experienced developers can get up close and personal with six modernization options. This evening gives the perfect opportunity for Forms developers to get a hands-on experience with one or two methods for modernizing the Forms experience. The architects of a number of largely complementary solutions to the modernization challenge will host up close & personal sessions where in depth questions can be asked, experiences discussed and tools tried out. Strong technical skills and several years for Forms experience are strongly recommended to truly benefit from the availability of this fine selection of speakers.

The following document provides in depth details on the six sessions staged in the evening http://www.amis.nl/theme/amis/uploadedFiles/PDF/Future%20of%20Forms%20EN%20AVOND.pdf.

Registration for this technical evening event can be done via: http://www.amis.nl/event-inschrijving/?event_id=44.

Hands-on and In-Depth Sessions

Migrating Real Life Applications to Forms11g, ADF and APEX (Madi Serban & Andreas Gaede)
Join us in a practical session of migrating real life applications to Forms 11g, ADF and APEX. Got a complex application or migration example? We will take the challenge! We will discuss and exemplify the most interesting situations and solutions met in our latest projects.

Getting hands-on with YoForms (Oliver Tickell and Don Smith)
One aspect of the communications revolution of recent years is the ubiquity of handheld devices – iPads, Blackberries, Androids and numerous generic Smartphones. Increasingly Forms users want to deploy their applications to such devices – and to do so in a universal way so as not to be tied to any particular technology. We determined that this would best be achieved by rendering to the browser using only HTML and JavaScript. A further requirement was pixel-accurate rendition – necessary because so many forms are laid out with pixel accuracy. We also wanted to reproduce precisely the original functionality so that Forms users would experience no change in application behaviour. We were intially uncertain if this would even be possible. But we can now tell you that not only is it possible, but we have done it. Our solution, YoForms, is written entirely in JEE6 enterprise Java and runs on any standards compliant application server. It communicates with the browser via a lightweight AJAX layer designed to minimise traffic volume, and uses a small subset of HTML features to eliminate browser / device-specific display variations.

We will use this hands-on session to explore areas of particular interest in greater depth, in an informal and responsive style. YoForms will again be enabled over the WiFi network to facilitate a fully interactive approach.

OraPlayer Handson: Two heads are better than one: Create HTML,ADF and Mobile UI’s for an existing Oracle Forms business processes (service). (Mia Urman)

In this session you will see first-hand how you can run Oracle Forms business processes from any technology or UI. We will show how the same Oracle Forms system runs with the usual java applet on weblogic, then from a pure HTML UI in the browser, then from an ADF faces application using an “OraPlayer-Forms business process” data control and finally on your OWN mobile phone (wireless network permitting). We will then see how easy it is to maintain ( maintain one system and delpoy anywhere) when we change the FMB’s business logic in the Forms developer and see the change automatically reflected in all the UI’s.

JHeadstart Hands-on (Steven Davelaar)

By following this hands-on session, you’ll experience first-hand how Oracle JHeadstart 11g can help you in building a best-practice ADF web application. You will built a transactional web application based on 6 tables of the Oracle HR schema, that includes rich functionality like quick and advanced search, a wizard in a popup window, a shuttle picker, a tree control, validation using list of values, conditionally dependent items, a graph, dynamic breadcrumbs, context-sensitive linking, validation rules and multi-language support. In addition, you will see how you can easily customize the generated artifacts and how you can preserve these customizations upon regeneration. Since no Java coding is required to implement the tutorial, even developers with minimal-to-no Java skills can follow along.

Deep dive with OraFormsFaces (Wilfred van der Deijl)
While the time is too short for a complete environment set up and initiation to ADF – the first natural habitat for embedd Forms wih OraFormsFaces, this deep dive is not so much about hands-on, but intended to take a deep dive with OraFormsFaces. Wilfred will show advanced demos, explain about real life experiences gathered around the world and discuss various migration strategies. In this intimate setting, there is also plenty of opportunity for discussion and detailed Q&A.

Forms 11g – How modern can Forms itself be? (Lucas Jellema)
Forms 11g is quite something else than Forms 6.0. Many features have been added over the last decade, including Pluggable Java Components, Java Script integration, SOA integration and the WebLogic Server infrastructure. As a result, quite attractive, modern looking and interacting applications can be created using Forms 11g. In this hands-on session, participants will receive a Virtual Machine with Forms 11g and a number of labs that clearly demonstrate the power of some of these new features and make evident that a revitalization of Forms is within reach. To participate in this session, Forms development skills are a prerequisite.