Re: The history of forms and reports

From: Rob van Lopik <lopik_at_mail.telepac.pt>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 15:18:05 +0100
Message-ID: <8ne7pr$v1t$1_at_venus.telepac.pt>


[Quoted] "Simong" <simong_at_explor.co.uk> wrote in message news:7oum5.1891$Vc.1527077_at_newsr2.u-net.net...
> I am wanting find out what the history of Forms and reports is.
>
> Example: When was forms/reports released and what years were new versions
> introduced etc... Also major enhancements e.g.. green to gui and also any
> info on where these products are going would be helpful.

To fully answer this question would take me more time than I have now.

Forms and Reports are separate product, also in their development. Forms is the oldest, by far.

When we started using Oracle in 1982 (version 2.3.2 on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP11/44 with the RSX11M operating system) the database already came with a forms product and reporting tools. The latter were called RPT and RPF and may still be found at some sites. The forms product was called IAF (Interactive Application Facility). It consisted of two programs, IAG (Interactive Appl. Generator) and IAP (Interactie Appl. Program). IAG was a question/answer style terminal application, that asked for table names, column names, screen positions etc. and generated a kind of application definition file (with the defalt extension .FRM). Thereafter you were to run IAP (now Runform) with this file. Of course this all ran on dumb (?) ASCII terminals. Note that IAF was not a product that you could buy separately from the database. Also note that Oracle company than was called RSI (from Relational Technologies Incorporated). They left this name long before it took on the present mouse-related meaning. IAF did not contain a menu facility. This was developed by Nico van der Klugt, at that time with the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture (i.e. the above mentioned customer), later with Oracle Europe. In 1986 Oracle unbuncled all of its tools from the database, giving them new fancy names. SQL*Plus was the new name for the commandline program that originally was called UFI (User Friendly Interface) just like in the original IBM system R. SQL*Forms was the new name for IAF, SQL*Menu was the menu system, that only later lost its name to merge into SQL*Forms. At that time we were speaking SQL*Forms version 2.0. The only other release I remember was 2.3.
Release 3.0 was the first one to contain PL/SQL. It became available around 1990.
These product were still character based. Oracle had bad luck producing a GUI version. They decided for an architecture ware GUI-renderings for different platforms (Mac, X-Windows, MS-Windows) could be plugged in). The first version of this "graphical toolkit" was simply unstable. After that they had a second try by concentrating on MS-Windows. But still the first version of Forms (4.0) was unstable and we had to wait till version 4.5 before a usable SQL*Forms GUI became available.

As for report writing, in 1988 the trusted pair RPF/RPT was succeeded by SQL*Reportwriter, which in turn had to give way to SQL*Reports around 1994. The three are totally unrelated, as far as I know.

I am curious what others will be able to say about the history of Forms

greetings

Rob van Lopik
DouroVision Consultoria Informática Lda, Portugal Received on Wed Aug 16 2000 - 16:18:05 CEST

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