The Future of Oracle Forms Straight From the Source’s Mouth
At Kscope14 ODTUG had a “Social Media Lounge” where they interviewed leaders and visionaries in various technology fields. They have just released a great one where John King, a renowned Oracle ACE Director for middleware and Oracle development tools, interviewed Michael Ferrante, the Oracle Forms Product Manager. Of course the hot topic was the future of Forms. When asked about this Michael responded:
“I’m smiling because I hear that [Forms is dead] a lot as well. I don’t know where that rumor started from. Some time ago when we [Oracle] made the decision years ago to start developing with ADF, I think at that point ADF became so popular that Forms seemed to fade away, when really we were still hard at work at it [Forms]. We have a really big community and hopefully we get to continue for years to come. Right now we’ve got the current release, which is 11, release 2 and it’s supported through 2016. And we’re working on the next version, which hopefully will be out sometime in 2015.”
Michael explained that the next release will be supported for the following 5 years (like all Oracle products) with an option to extend for an additional 3 years. This means that Forms is pretty much set until 2023. Once again I will shout it, Forms is NOT dead.
This time its not me who’s saying it. Its a promise straight from the Oracle Forms PM himself. I hope this will finally prove to you all that Oracle has no plans to abandon their Forms legacy customers. They are continuing to work on new releases with new features to satisfy their customers.
When asked what customers can do to prepare for the latest version Michael mentioned that many customers are still running very old versions of Forms. In order to take advantage of the new version that will be released in 2015 these customers need to update to 11. If you make the move to version 11 today it will make updating to 12, when it is released, very easy.
Hearing all of this promising news directly from Michael should be music to any Oracle Forms user’s ears. You can watch the full video here.
If you need assistance in upgrading your Oracle Forms system or would like to discuss your personal Forms challenges email us at info@old.auraplayer.com.