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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In Detail
Although Oracle Forms remains popular, many developers now see Oracle APEX as a preferred technology. Oracle Forms to Oracle APEX conversion projects follow a well-defined procedure, but sub-procedures and complexities can arise that make such conversion projects a challenging job.This book will take you through a real Oracle Forms to APEX conversion project. It explains all the elements of the conversion, from generating XML files to the deployment of a working APEX application. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the process of Forms conversion.
The book starts with the details of the Forms project, and prepares you for the conversion process. You will use the rwconverter and Reports Builder in Oracle Developer Suite to generate XML and other useful files. You will plan and define the business logic for your conversion project. You will use the Forms Converter in Oracle APEX to convert and customize your Oracle Forms applications. Finally, you will deploy your application.
With this book you will understand what a Forms Conversion project in Oracle APEX means, what needs to be done, and what steps are necessary in order to create a fully functional and meaningful conversion project. This book shows the best way to convert applications from Forms to APEX.
A step-by-step tutorial for converting Oracle Forms applications to Oracle APEX
Approach
Packed with plentiful screenshots and clear explanations, this book is a step-by-step tutorial that demonstrates a successful Oracle Forms to Oracle APEX Conversion project.
Who this book is for
This book is for Oracle Forms developers who want to migrate to Oracle APEX. The book will also be useful for Oracle APEX developers who want to convert their older Forms applications to Oracle APEX applications.
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Seitenzahl: 171
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009
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Table of Contents
Oracle Application Express Forms Converter
A migration guide using the APEX conversion utility
Douwe Pieter van den Bos
Oracle Application Express Forms Converter
A migration guide using the APEX conversion utility
Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author(s), nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: July 2009
Production Reference: 2230709
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847197-76-4
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Parag Kadam ( <[email protected]> )
Credits
Author
Douwe Pieter van den Bos
Reviewers
David Peake
Dimitri Gielis
Louis-Guillaume Carrier-Bédard
Acquisition Editor
James Lumsden
Development Editor
Siddharth Mangarole
Technical Editors
Aditi Srivastava
Chaitanya Apte
Copy Editor
Sneha Kulkarni
Editorial Team Leader
Abhijeet Deobhakta
Project Team Leader
Lata Basantani
Project Coordinator
Joel Goveya
Proofreader
Laura Booth
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Production Coordinator
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Cover Work
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Foreword
Oracle Forms has been around for a long time. When I started writing computer programs over 20 years ago, I was lucky enough to get to work on an Oracle project where I got to learn all about Oracle Forms 2.3 and Oracle Database 5. Going forward, I worked with most versions of Oracle Forms together with Oracle Designer and some Oracle Reports, and various versions of the Oracle database. I primarily worked on custom development, and so gathered a wealth of Oracle Forms and PL/SQL knowledge.
In 2003, I first learned about a tool called Project Marvel—which is now known as Oracle Application Express, or simply APEX—even before it became an official Oracle product. I was working for Oracle Consulting, and at that time almost every job in Oracle Consulting required Java skills. I was very relieved to find that the skill set for developing APEX applications was primarily PL/SQL. Re-training in APEX is relatively easy as APEX is a declarative framework with numerous wizards for creating screens, which can then be extended using PL/SQL—much the same as the Oracle Forms. There are some fundamental differences in the way the two tools operate. For example, Oracle Forms maintains a continuous connection with the Oracle Database and uses pessimistic locking, whereas APEX only connects to the database when rendering or posting a page and uses optimistic locking.
I joined a project in 2003 for a large law enforcement agency that was actually the primary beta site for APEX. I spent four years on that project, where we were very successful in manually converting several legacy Oracle Forms applications into a suite of APEX applications. That suite now runs the majority of the police departments operations. During my tenure, I trained over 20 Oracle Forms developers in APEX and on an average the developers were productively developing APEX applications within two weeks.
Then in 2007, I transferred from Oracle Consulting to Server Technologies to become the Product Manager for Oracle Application Express. I worked very closely with the APEX Development Team on our Forms Conversion components. Our key objective was to provide a valuable tool that "assists" you in converting Oracle Forms applications. Our intention was never to provide a 100% conversion tool whereby you enter some source files, press a few buttons, and immediately get a production-ready application. Instead, our focus was on automatically converting the components that we can and then providing tracking capabilities through the annotations, which you will learn in detail in this book.
With respect to Oracle Forms, this tool has been utilized extensively to solve business requirements for decades. It is a very robust, high-performance tool that is still being developed and will continue to be supported for years to come. In fact, Oracle Forms 11g was recently released as a part of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.
Converting from Oracle Forms to any other technology, including APEX, will require significant time and effort; and should be treated as a project. And that is where this book will prove invaluable—to help you understand not only how the APEX Forms Conversion tool works, but also how to plan and execute your conversion project. This book walks you through the conversion of a sample application and explains the various features. Moreover, it also provides an excellent insight into how you can get the most from using this tool. Douwe Pieter has written a great book that is easy to follow and will definitely help any Oracle Forms developers to better understand what is involved with converting their applications to APEX.
David Peake
Oracle Application Express Product Manager
Server Technologies, Database Tools
Oracle USA Inc.
http://dpeake.blogspot.com
About the Author
Douwe Pieter van den Bos started working as an Oracle Developer using Oracle Designer and Oracle Forms. Soon he discovered the wondrous world of Oracle Application Express and was one of the first people in the Netherlands to be using this tool in real live applications. His first encounters with the development of APEX applications and, later on, his thoughts on web development and project management were written down on his own personal website, http://ome-b.nl. This web site became the only Dutch APEX related website and a knowledge base on everything APEX.
Because of his fast experience on Oracle Database development and Oracle Forms, and his 'love' for Oracle Application Express, Douwe Pieter experimented a lot with Oracle Forms to APEX conversion over the last few years, resulting in knowledge about the different challenges this brings. During the Beta tests of APEX 3.2 Douwe Pieter was involved, and he personally ensured that certain requirements weren't overlooked.
Douwe Pieter is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and has written numerous articles on application development, including APEX-specific application development.
I would like to thank David Peake for giving me more information than I could handle, and Dimitri Gielis and Louis-Guillaume for the brilliant comments and making me see things from a new angle. I am also grateful to James Lumsden, Siddharth Mangarole, and Joel Goveya for all the work they did for me. I would like to express my gratitude to my mother and sister who thought this was the coolest thing in the world, although they don't have a clue as to what it is about, and also my friends who thought this was just cool enough to celebrate with a few drinks.
About the Reviewers
David Peake joined Oracle in Australia in 1993. He spent the first 13 years in Oracle Consulting, working on various assignments across Australia, New Zealand, and the USA. During this time David concentrated on custom development projects of varying sizes, initially using Oracle Designer and Oracle Forms and later Project Marvel, which when it became an official Oracle product was called HTML DB, before being renamed to Oracle Application Express (APEX). In 2006, he transferred to development within Server Technologies—Database Tools as the Product Manager for Oracle Application Express. David liaises between the APEX development team and the many APEX customers and has presented at numerous conferences around the world. He also contributed on Beginning Oracle Application Express by Rick Greenwald (WROX Publishing).
Dimitri Gielis was born in 1978. Together with his family he lives in Leuven, Belgium.
Already at an early age, Dimitri started with computers (Apple II, IBM XT) and he quickly knew he would like to work with computers and especially with databases all his life.
In 2000 Dimitri began his career working as a consultant for Oracle Belgium where he got in touch with almost every Oracle product. His main expertise was in the database area, but at that time he was also exposed to HTML DB which was renamed Oracle Application Express later on. From the very start he liked the Oracle database and APEX so much he never stopped working with it. Dimitri then switched to another company to create an Oracle team and do pre-sales, to later create and manage an Oracle Business Unit.
In 2007 Dimitri co-founded APEX Evangelists (http://www.apex-evangelists.com), together with John Scott. APEX Evangelists is a company which specializes in providing training, development, and consulting specifically for the Oracle Application Express product.
On his blog (http://dgielis.blogspot.com) he shares his thoughts and experience about Oracle and especially Oracle Application Express.
Dimitri is a frequent presenter at IOUG Collaborate, ODTUG Kaleidoscope, UKOUG conference, and Oracle Open World. He likes to share his experience and meet other people. He's also the Vice President of the IOUG APEX SIG.
In 2008 Dimitri became an Oracle ACE Director. Oracle ACE Directors are known for their strong credentials as Oracle community enthusiasts and advocates.
You can contact Dimitri at <[email protected]>.
Louis-Guillaume Carrier-Bédard has been working for the past three years with Oracle Application Express. The APEX community benefits from his blog and tutorials regarding jQuery integration. Developments for the private and public sectors have contributed to build him a solid background. Many projects, from the simple proof of concept to mission critical application, have contributed to Louis-Guillaume's deep knowledge of APEX.
Louis-Guillaume recently joined SIE-Solutions to build systems for SMEs/SMBs. They organize seminars and they launched www.apexquebec.com, a web site dedicated to Quebec's Apex community. SIE-Solutions is offering a framework for Oracle APEX.
I would like to say thank you to Clément Carrier, my grandfather. This great man gave me the taste for knowledge and books.
Salut Papi!
Preface
Oracle Application Express has been around for quite a while now. It has a lot of advantages, such as the possibility to really use the Internet and create fast-performing applications. For the last decade, we developed our applications using another tool, namely Oracle's Forms Developer. Using this development tool for such a long time means we often have a lot of critical applications built in Oracle Forms. But for many people, now is the time to make the transition from Forms to APEX. However, we don't want to develop all our Forms screens again, so Oracle has kindly come up with the Forms Converter for Oracle Application Express in Oracle APEX 3.2.
With the Oracle Forms Conversion tool, we can now generate Oracle Application Express pages from our original Forms (FMB) files. Using this commodity, it is possible to have controllable Forms to APEX Conversion project and in this book we will learn just how to do such projects.
Oracle Forms
Coming from IAF via FastForms and later SQL*Forms, Oracle Forms Developer has been the main GUI development tool on the Oracle Database since version 6. There have been some changes in the product over the years where WebForms was the biggest change, moving from client-server to a web-server environment. It gave the users the possibility to implement a GUI environment over the Web, but the basics stayed the same. The Oracle Forms applications run in a JavaApplet (J2EE) called Jinitior, and have been built using the Oracle Forms Developer and the PL/SQL language.
Moving away from Oracle Forms requires some guts. Most organizations using Forms have large knowledge of the tool and the PL/SQL language, and don't move to a completely different environment in a short period of time. Languages such as Java are difficult to learn and hard to understand for developers not trained in the object-oriented language sets.
And there was APEX.
Oracle Application Express
Oracle Application Express, in short APEX, was a new way of looking at PL/SQL GUI development using only a web browser. Developers could still be using their fast knowledge on PL/SQL and the Oracle Database, and since APEX version 3.2 (released on the February 27, 2009, a memorable day) we were able to convert Oracle Forms applications to APEX easily. This is what this book is all about.
Forms conversion
Using the new possibilities in Oracle Application Express, we will find a new way to create APEX pages from our original Forms and Reports applications. We no longer have to build them from scratch if we want to generate the pages in APEX. Forms Conversion has made it possible to create APEX applications from our Forms and Reports applications in a fast and reliable way. But beware; we still have to do some work to make it all possible. In this book we will point out the steps you will have to take to create your applications using the Forms Conversion tool.
Every Forms and Reports application consists of a few elements, namely Forms modules, Menus, PL/SQL libraries, Object libraries, and Report modules. All these elements will be used in our Forms Conversion project. They will all be translated to their own specific APEX components during the conversion.
In the following diagram provided to us from Oracle, you can clearly see which steps need to be taken, and in which order, to create and execute a Forms Conversion project. As we can see, the main part of the project will be done in the Oracle Application Express Forms Converter.
With our Forms Conversion project, we will have to use different tools to create our APEX application. Of course, we will have to use APEX as it contains the most important piece of tooling we have got, the APEX Forms Conversion tool. But besides that we will have to use Forms and Reports Builder, the File Conversion Utilities, and the Forms2XML Conversion Tool.
In this book we will generally learn how to create suitable XML files, but most work in our Forms Conversion project will be done in APEX.
Generate Application Express applications
In order to generate an APEX application, we will have to do some steps. First, we will have to create our XML files from the different Forms components. After that, we shall create our Conversion project in Oracle Application Express.
The project page is the point where we will be really working on our Forms Conversion. Because of the possibilities it gives us, we will learn how to analyze and adjust our Forms components in order to generate an APEX application.
The following screenshot shows the project home page in the APEX Forms Converter. This page is used to control our project and it shows our progress in the project.
Using the project home page in the Forms Conversion part of APEX, we can easily scan our application components and see how we are progressing. This is the place where we do our metadata analysis of the XML files we uploaded and the ones our project consists of. We can see all the elements of our Forms Conversion project, so we have a point where we can control everything we need to do in our project in the project home page.
Even after generating our APEX application, we will have some other things to do. Because of the large differences between APEX and Forms, we will need to adjust some things such as the logic and the User Interface defaults. We will see how the APEX application we generated responds to users, and how we need to make some adjustments in order to create a user-friendly and stable application.
Possibilities and benefits
Web 2.0 has taken a leap in the last few years; interactive user interfaces and the possibilities of tying applications together are the cornerstones of Oracle Application Express. Modern Internet applications offer users the possibility to create and adjust their own information just as a desktop application would, but with the advantages of accessing the applications over the Internet. APEX offers a lot of these Web 2.0 components out of the box, such as interactive reporting and flash charts. With interactive reporting, the users can define their own reporting, meaning they have control over the filters, break points, and calculations done in these reports.
Both Forms and APEX are completely SQL and PL/SQL based, so the transition from Forms to APEX should be easy to learn. Both tools are declarative, wizard-driven, rapid development tools. With the use of the Forms Conversion tool, it will be possible to speed up the transition to APEX within your organization. The tool uses our knowledge of the Forms applications we convert to let us make the best choices possible.
Oracle Application Express and, therefore, the Forms Conversion Tool is a no-cost option on the Oracle Database. Because of this and the fact that we no longer need an Application Server, APEX is the choice to make if you want to convert your Forms and Report applications to a web environment.
The Forms Conversion in Oracle Application Express offers us numerous possibilities when generating APEX pages from our original Forms, Reports, and Menus. These possibilities are extensive and, when wisely used, offer reductions in developer effort. In doing so, our transition from Oracle Forms and Reports to Oracle Application Express should be quicker and easier all round.
Navigating and adjusting logic is possibly the largest possible advantage you can get from the Forms Conversion tool in Application Express. We get information from the metadata (which is in the Forms, Reports, Menus, and Libraries) and have the advantage of knowing about the logic and different components before we begin the conversion.
Comparison
Forms Conversion in Oracle Application Express is not migration but a conversion, as the word literally means. We will generate a different kind of application, namely an Internet application instead of a desktop or a Web Forms application.
Remind yourself that Forms Conversion in Oracle Application Express is not a way to emulate or completely migrate your Forms applications. Your users will get a different kind of application, and hence a different user experience. We will generate an Internet application, which also means that a lot of the functionality we've got in Forms will return in a different way. Forms conversion in Application Express doesn't mean we will have a Forms emulator or a complete replacement for the functionality within the Forms and Reports applications; we will create an interactive web application.
