What is the Future of Oracle Forms? Our Twitter Battle Weigh In
During the past few weeks, there seemed to be another fight about the future of Oracle Forms in the latest Twitter battle.
On one side, we had the Forms diehards claiming that Oracle has been trying to kill off the product for years, and specifically accusing the Oracle ADF Project Managers to be behind it all. While on the other side, we had people like Grant Ronald spearheading the charge that the ADF Product Managers were not the ones spreading false panic about Oracle trying to kill off Forms, explaining that their philosophy has always been- until this day- that customers should choose the right tool for the right job.
In all fairness, hundreds of times I have heard Grant Ronald explain that “people would not hammer in a nail with the back of a screwdriver”. And it is the same thing with your Oracle Forms toolset.
I have worked with Grant for almost 2 decades, including when he was the ADF Product Manager. Together, we would do sessions all over the world about the future of Forms and the modernization of Forms. At no point did we claim that people should throw away their Forms investments, but instead we showed how they could leverage the existing forms with new ADF front ends using AuraPlayer.
As you can see here, in this video series, he was a supreme champion of leveraging Oracle Forms into the next generation. Grant never claimed, at any point, that Forms was about to die, rather that we should figure out how to include Forms into the digital and cloud generation that was quickly becoming the new reality.
Similar to Grant, Michael Ferrante has been our rock at Oracle, spearheading this same philosophy by investing a lot of energy and showing an incredible amount of perseverance. So much so that he ultimately got the powers that be at Oracle to invest money into supplying a version of Oracle Forms on Oracle Cloud infrastructure! This was really our dinosaur in space moment when we saw a whole new version of Forms, that allowed for the future of Oracle Forms as a cloud product.
With all the heated discussion on Twitter, it was important for us to put our two cents in this in a blog for clarity and for posterity. And we couldn’t do the topic justice on Twitter with a 280 character limit, because it’s just too important.
In the past, the Apex team did claim that they were the next generation of Forms. And that the best option was, of course, to stop using Forms and to redevelop those investments in Apex, utilizing the wizard that Apex provides and then redeveloping the rest of the backend code. We also had Twitter fights about this for decades.
We were honored and surprised when, about a year ago, Insum came to us and said that they wanted to begin a deep partnership with AuraPlayer. They saw that in the case of major Forms applications with hundreds of forms with very complex business, redevelopment of all forms might not be the best way. And they sought to partner with us in order to bring about a hybrid solution. You could read more about the partnership and our philosophy for how to bring Forms into the next generation in this whitepaper and see the incredible results of our partnership in this demo video.
What remains clear is that no matter what application we choose to develop in, in the future, a hybrid environment is the best way to preserve your return on investment, to ensure the stability of the system, and to leverage your existing investments going forward. Oracle has renewed their commitment to supporting Oracle Forms, as you can see here.
So there is no immediate need to rush off of Forms, no matter what an Oracle Sales Representative might be telling you while trying to sell you the newest Cloud product.
In addition, you might choose to be developing in a next-generation technology, based with an HTML or JavaScript front end as your next-generation tool set. And there are many to choose from, whether it’s open source, Oracle’s Visual Builder, Oracle Apex or others- including AuraPlayer, that provides you with a Forms modernization wizard. So, whatever your choice may be, no one thinks that throwing away Oracle Forms is the way to go.
In the meantime, if you’re at a crossroads trying to decide your way forward, we’d be happy to help you — as we’ve done for hundreds of others. Feel free to reach out for your free consultation.
