Oracle Forms to Mobile is Now a Reality! ADF Mobile Support for Oracle Forms

Creating the above demo was a truly exciting project for us. We had developed in ADF in the past but had never ventured into the world of iOS or mobile development. To our surprise working in ADF mobile came very naturally us and in only a matter of days we had developed small but fully functional application.  The development experience in Jdeveloper was very similar, even though the resulting UI would be mobile.

In planning our demo, it was important for us to show the entire development cycle and not just a demo of the final product. We began development by creating the sample application that we posted on the blog Oracle Forms to ADF Mobile: The Ultimate Modernization Challenge. The response we got was incredible. We got suggestions from customers and Oracle Directors alike on what they would like to see as a proof of concept in the follow up demos.  So with guidance from 2 Oracle gurus, Denis Tyrell, Director of Oracle ADF UI product management and Grant Ronald Director of product management for Oracle Forms and ADF, we set out to create a demo that could be the best of both worlds—leverage the existing Oracle Forms investment without redevelopment while taking advantage of the incredible visual elements and features the mobile world provides when using ADF Mobile framework.

This project also really helped us understand the meaning of modernization.  At first, as Forms developers we were just so happy and shocked to see the existing forms system running on the iPhone, we did not even think about how the system looked. It was only when Denis said, “wouldn’t the users want to look at a map and not at that plain grey address field?”  that we understood what it would mean to deploy forms on a mobile. When we expose Oracle Forms to the mobile it’s not enough to run the same existing form in its same design just on the mobile. We must fully understand the functionality needed in the mobile application and make use of the  added features ADF Mobile has to offer. This allowed us to take the existing Summit application and, for example, add location based mapping, and SMS functionality as well as graphing capabilities that did not exist in the original form system.

Once the demo was completed it was great to hear from Grant Ronald, who asked all the tough questions from a Forms developer point of view. What would happen if data in the form changed? What would happen if the fmx changed? Could we do inserts over the mobile UI as well?  This helped us come up with additional demos that showcased the full power of running Oracle Forms as a webservice using an ADF Mobile UI on an iPhone.