Re: The history of forms and reports

From: Frank <fbortel_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 10:33:05 +0200
Message-ID: <39A38C41.28CC03DD_at_hotmail.com>


Well, actually forms 2.4 exists - it is the y2k compliant version for apps. never released to the public, tho, only in apps.

don't now dates, but oracle4 had forms 2.0, v5 had 2.3, v6 had 3.0, and with v7, gui version 4.0 came along, quickly to be superseeded by v4.5 (v4.0 was internally called "the version that should never have been").
forms v5 was the next release, 1998, v6 followed in 1999, which is now renamed to v6i (2000), but merely patched, not much new functionality.

all this GUI stuff meant reports had to go pixel based as well. with forms 4.0, reports 2.0 came along. forms 4.5 was accompanied by reports 2.5,
forms 5 came with reports 3.0, and still is (tho called reports 6i, functionality is extended).

Rob van Lopik wrote:
>
> "Simong" <simong_at_explor.co.uk> wrote in message
 <snip>
> 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 23 2000 - 10:33:05 CEST

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