Plea to Oracle!

This is a plea to Oracle Forms and Reports managers.

Please do not remove support for character-mode in Forms and Reports!!!

I don't know what assanine force pushes Oracle to do some really stupid things that cater
to the hoi poloi of today's IT community. There is no academic basis for some of the design changes in it's products. People want graphics and windows everywhere not realizing that GUI is a means to an end not an end in itself. Everything in this world does not need to be in a bloody window to be useful!!! They changed the oracle installer on SUN to be all GUI. Now I have to load MOTIF and graphics cards on a headless SUN Sparcs to install Oracle! They used to have a character-mode installer up to 8.0.5!!

Character-mode requires very little in terms of resource usage. You can use a simple 386 with a kermit term emulator to connect to Forms applications. Also you can deploy one instance of the form file on a central UNIX server and have it accesed by the rest of the user base. If you make one stupid change to a boiler plate text item, you only make the change to one file and not have to distribute it to 150 PCs. It saves a lot of time and hassle. Granted not all apps are suitable for character-mode, many still only require character-mode.

Also one only requires minimal bandwidth for remote connectivity. A modem and terminal
will suffice! IBM mainframes ran and still run some of the biggest db apps in character-mode
employing a centrally and professionally managed paradigm. This recent concept of federation and distribution of processing through client-server using MickeySoft and PEECEEs have really created more maintenance headaches.... (eg ODBC)

Also many people in the US, Europe and Australia still use character-mode. Who wants to have to upgrade ever bloody PEECEE with new versions of Oracle Client and Forms and run around like some IT weenie annointing every office worker's feet with perfume and holy water and have to listen to their petty life stories. :-)

Character-mode is important! Received on Mon Jul 19 1999 - 20:57:29 CDT