Oracle E-Biz Suite and Oracle Forms vs ADF ... oh and Fusion

I've often been part of many a heated discussion on the future direction of Oracle E-Business Suite (when I refer the Oracle E-Business Suite I mean as it is in its current form and not the new generation of Fusion Applications). When Oracle originally announced the future in the form of Fusion, many people seemed to assume that Fusion would be the medium to long term replacement for Oracle E-Business Suite; it soon became apparent that whilst Oracle were strongly pushing the whole Fusion thing, they also began to talk about Fusion as an alternative rather than replacement. This is bolstered by the fact that later Oracle announced their Applications Unlimited strategy, which essentially means that Oracle will continue to develop and support all of their applications in their current (or similar) form so long as their are organizations using them.

Whilst there will always be organizations who are willing to replace their enterprise applications every 3 to 5 years or so, there are just as many (if not more) who will not want to do this and resist for as long as possible. This resistence will effectively ensure that there are organizations still using Oracle E-Business Suite for many years to come (at least 5 years and perhaps 10 years or more). Sure there will be upgrades, currently we are on R12, we'll get R12.5, then R13 and so on, sure the technology will advance but it will still heavily rely on Oracle technology; obviously the database will be Oracle and the there will still be many aspects of the suite that will continue to use the Oracle Forms technology in preference to the ADF (the HTML/Java stuff).

Now don't get me wrong, more and more modules of the suite are moving over to ADF and new modules tend to be developed using ADF but let us take a quick snapshot of R12; there are still more than 3,800 professional Oracle Forms modules along with just short of 2,000 supporting PLL library modules present in R12 (there is also more than 2,000 Oracle Reports modules). This is a huge amount of code which probably represents at least half of everything R12 has to offer. To my mind, one of the reasons for this is that ADF for some applications simply cannot compete with Oracle Forms (delivered within a browser) in terms of functionality, ease of use and performance.

As web technology evolves, ADF is certainly gaining ground but it is still a long way behind Oracle Forms in many respects. Then there is the development of ADF applications verus Oracle Forms, again ADF is gaining ground and many people are attempting to claim that ADF is just as easy to develop in as Oracle Forms but in my humble opinion, ADF doesn't come close. Yes there are many wizards available in various IDE's that generate a lot of code along with drag and drop form building and there are lots of pre-built blocks of code available but in terms of ease of development, Oracle Forms is king of the development jungle. With ADF there are many technologies to get to grips with and many of the languages used can often be a little script-like and cryptic; with Oracle Forms there are essentially just two things to learn, Oracle Forms itself and PL/SQL and that is it. ADF is an evolving technology that is certainly better at the self-service aspects of modern applications but here is no doubt that for building data-intensive backoffice applications then Oracle Forms and PL/SQL together are a very tough act to follow. I think that over time more and more will be ADF based but there will still be many of the core modules that contains Oracle Forms elements.

Staying on the topic of Oracle Forms, there is an age old debate that Forms is on its way out, as far as I can determine this is just not the case. In Oracle's own Statement of Direction, Oracle state that they are commited to the future of Forms and will continue to develop and support it for many years to come. Of course they are pushing their ADF technology but rest assured, Oracle Forms is here to stay for a long time.

Cheers,

Craig.

Oh go on then...

So its 21:15 on a Sunday evening, I've got 10 minutes spare to I thought I would finally start a blog. I've been tempted a couple of times over the years and have been asked to do a blog a few times by my peers but I've always declined with the same excuse - no time!!

Now don't ask me why but about 10 minutes ago I decided that a blog would be an ideal forum to vent occasionally, somewhere to moan and groan and perhaps give a little insight into the life of a software entrepreneur.

I am the founder of a software company called CaoSys; the company began life in the early part of 1999 and now has a mature suite of solutions all designed to bring additional value to organizations who use Oracle E-Business Suite.

I intend to post at least once or twice a month with little snippets of info relating to the things I get up to in my role and chief of everything at CaoSys, this might include product updates, ideas, business development, industry info and anything else I may feel the need to rant about.

Cheers,

Craig.