Chapter 3: Oracle Forms 10g

Things have come a long way from the early incarnations of the Oracle Forms toolkit. Early versions were not only crude, text-only forms, but they were also platform-specific as well. Later versions have added a graphical user interface (GUI) development environment and support for web deployment and Java, resulting in a robust, flexible development environment.

History

Oracle has made an attempt to synchronize the versions of each of their tools. With the release of Oracle 10 g , a new version of the Forms development toolkit has also been released. The changes between the previous version (Forms 9 i ) and Oracle Forms 10 g are surprisingly few. Internally, the current release of the Oracle Forms tools is version 9.0.4. If you are familiar with the toolset for 9 i , using the latest version won t require many changes.

Major changes in functionality marked the migration from Oracle Forms version 6 to Oracle Forms 9 i . With Oracle Forms 9 i , Oracle finally moved away from the client-server model and fully embraced web deployment for all forms. The crude support for Web Forms in Forms 6 i gave way to a fully web-enabled toolkit. Dropping the client-server deployment option for Forms was a big change for most developers.