Oracle Forms is Alive and Kicking! Oracle Forms Modernization Day

This past Tuesday, I had the privilege of running the Oracle Forms user group conference. It all started when Grant Ronald (Oracle Forms and JDeveloper product manager) and I got to talking at Open World 2011. We were saying how Oracle Forms developers are a huge community but the forgotten people. Every Oracle conference of recent years has been filled with sessions on ADF, SOA, APEX, BPEL and all other 3 letter curse words (OOPS I mean buzz words). But for the past few years Forms has dropped off the “session titles” map.

Well we decided then and there to make a conference specifically geared to the Oracle Forms developers community. With the help of Eyal Shani, CTO of Oracle Israel and Ami Aharonovitch, head of the Israel Oracle User Group (our heroes), we set out to prove that the Forms development community is a force to be reckoned with.

And rest assured, there were plenty of nay sayers: “No one still develops in forms”, “You won’t get more than 50 people” – Sound familiar? Well, this Tuesday, I got to say those three precious words: “TOLD YOU SO! ” With nearly 200 developers who attended, the event was a rousing success.

The day began with a session by Grant on the strategic direction of Forms. In a clear and proud voice, he declared that Oracle Forms is alive and well and will continue to be for a good long time.

Ofer Krichman, CTO and infrastructure manager of Isracard (Mastercard in Israel) then shared an incredible customer story about how Forms-related technologies improved his business. It is rare for a manager at his level to have such a deep understanding of the 30 technologies under his management and we were all impressed. I think when he told the forum that removing the web cache doubled his performance, half the room fell off their chairs! It’s those little nuggets of wisdom that make these forums so useful. You can see the presentation here: Isracard Customer Story

Then I had my session on best practices for migrating and upgrading Forms applications. Truth is, I had enough information to do a 10 day course. With developers working in versions 3.0 – 11g, character mode, client server, IAS and weblogic, it was no easy feat to give best practices in under 30 minutes. [Upon popular demand, we’re hoping to have another forum gathering to drill down further with more tips and tricks specific to different versions.]

We then had a live demo of Weblogic, Jdeveloper and a customer story and demo of my solution, OraPlayer. Yaron Ralevi from Malam-Coral showed how he was able to use the OraPlayer solution to build a mobile app that runs his Forms business logic – in only a day. It was pretty cool view it here

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO8wWWpF2_c&w=400]

Then, we had a session about the new features of Forms 11g that allow you to take advantage of SOA. I did a killer demo of an Oracle Form application with an embedded google map and weather. (This demo form will be available to download shortly). Finally, we had a half day master class by Grant on ADF development for Forms users.

In short a huge success it was standing room only! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a conference where so many people stay from 8 am – 5 pm and the room is at full attention.