Re: Oracle Forms VS Java

"Ryan" <rgaffuri_at_cox.net> schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:8mQBa.5012$pu4.878_at_news1.east.cox.net...
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> i have been told that forms has alot of network traffic over the web.. do
> you know if this is accurate?
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Forms over the web (aka Formsserver) application consume a lot of bandwidth upon the very first call, since the java-Applet has to be downloaded (later it can be kept in the cache). Same applies to client-side java.

At runtime though, Form seems to use network-resource very wisely. We have a cutomer that runs a large Forms-application (biggest .fmx >4MB!) that makes heavy use of stored procedures over 128kbit ISDN lines! The perfomance is satisfying - mean response-times are lower than 1sec. They used to run it in C/S (Net8 over ISDN) resulting in response-times topping 2 minutes(!) due to the heavy traffic (aprox. 2000 DB-calls upon initialization, several hundreds on record-change).

The same workstations run a "modern" Java application (a workflow-client) which is based on J2EE. This is slowed down by the ISDN-line to the limit of usability. It even degrades network-performance while being idle! OK, this might be a poor designed Java application, but the point is that one cannot generalize here.

The Forms application mentioned above ist scheduled for a redesign using J2EE. It will use Oracle's BC4J since this framework employs many of the bandwidth reducing techniques that come with Forms (I am not sure, but I believe that I read something like that Forms9i makes use of these framework itself.

The decision whether the application will be reimplemented in Java is not made, because we are looking forward to the 9i-version and its successors that will solve many of the current problems that triggered the discussion about the redesign.

We regard the productivity using Forms being much higher than using Java (considering our database-heavy application) and we have data from similar projects to prove this. Anyway Forms is considered critical, because it is very hard to find experienced Forms developers. There are a lot more java programmers out there that can be trained quickly to work with the chosen framework. Learning Forms is much harder.

Carsten Received on Sun Jun 01 2003 - 09:21:58 CEST