Oracle Forms 12c: Run Oracle Forms WITHOUT a Browser!

​AuraPlayer update: This blog post has been updated and can be found here.

People have been hearing that Oracle Forms is dead for almost 10 years now. Little do they know that today Oracle Forms is a major participant in the cloud ecosystem! It’s essential for organizations with major investments in Oracle Forms to understand that they do not need to throw away years of work, and introduce risk and cost into the system. Their existing back-office system can be leveraged into the next-generation.

We are excited to post the first in our Oracle Forms 12c guest series and introduce our first contributor and a loyal member of the Oracle Forms Community, Holger Lehmann.  

Today I would like to highlight 3 new runtime options to start your application: 

1 – The default case (as a browser plugin)

2 – With Java Web Start

3 – As a standalone client (Oracle Forms Standalone Application Launcher – FSAL)

Oracle definitely looked ahead towards the future with new operating system issues e.g. new browsers and their new behavior in Windows 10.

OPTION 1: The default case (as a browser plugin)

The normal way Oracle provides to start the Forms application out of the browser. Here, the client browser must support the Java Plugin Sample URL:http://w7x6412c-rdbms:9001/forms/frmservlet

OPTION 2: With Java Web Start

In the new version of Oracle Forms 12c Java Web is officially certified as a method for running your application. The client has to install Java as well. Sample URL: http://w7x6412c-rdbms:9001/forms/frmservlet?config=webstart&form=lab_540&userid=user/passwort@db

Here, certain restrictions are valid:

– No support JavaScript, since not running in the browser
– No SSO, no SSO Logout

OPTION 3: As a standalone client (Oracle Forms Standalone Application Launcher – FSAL)

Overview:
“The Oracle Forms Stand-alone Application Launcher (FSAL) offers an alternative way for end-users to run Oracle Forms applications. FSAL offers a browser-less, more client/server-like interface. As a result of not using a browser, FSAL does not use the Java Plugin component of a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Developer Kit (JDK). All that is required to run FSAL on the end-user machine is a Java installation. This can be either the JDK or the JRE. To determine which Java versions are supported, please contact your administrator.” taken from http://w7x6412c-rdbms:9001/forms/html/fsal.htm 

Starting from the fsal.htm you can load the associated frmsal.jar to the client. So quite simply, this method even works without a browser! But again with JDK or JRE on the client machine.

Sample Call in a command box:java -jar C:\Oracle\Middleware\Oracle_Home\forms\java\frmsal.jar -url “http://w7x6412c-rdbms:9001/forms/frmservlet?config=daylightstandaloneapp&form=lab_540&userid=user/passwort@db