Character mode for 7.3 and beyond

Has anyone given any thought to what it would take to make character-mode applications work with the newer versions of Oracle that no longer support it?

It must be possible.

I was looking at an installation where there is a really huge and complex application written in Forms 3.0. Now there is no way in hell that the client is going to want to rewrite all that code. It is immense. If there were monasteries full of monks that instead of writing manuscripts wrote Oracle code, they could be kept busy for a long long time. So no one is going to touch that stuff. Besides, it works very very well and is by now a trusted application.

However, this situation locks the client out of upgrading the Oracle database beyond a certain point. This is fine for now, but when Oracle decides to stop supporting this that and the other, what will they do? Probably just stop paying for support.

A much more viable alternative seems to me to develop some sort of middleware or interface that would let the older, character-based forms masquerade as something new. How hard would it be to develop? If anyone has any thoughts on the subject, I would be very interested to hear. Received on Tue Jul 08 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT