Re: Is Forms 4.0 stable?

In article 94Feb8105513_at_antfarm.oracle.com, kmallory_at_oracle.com (Kevin Mallory) writes:
> > resource
> > hog, and that it has slow response. However, I am impressed with the
> > features and think Forms 4 has a great potential.
>
> Please help me understand what you are trying to do with the product.
>
> "Resource Hog" doesn't adequately describe the problem, and neither
> does "Slow response".
>
> Yes, forms4 is big. This we know. There are application designs which
> can exascerbate the problem.
>
> "Slow Response". Give us a concrete example of what kind of operation
> you feel is slow. e.g. I have a form with 1000 LOV's in it, each of
> which brings up 100 rows. Accesing one of them for the nth time causes
> extremely slow response. This is the kind of feedback that will help
> us to help you.

It's very nice to have a willing ear to listen to Forms 4.0 users. I have spent probably the last 4 weeks on the phone with Oracle tech support, logging in excess of 50 different bugs, quirks, design issues, etc. of Forms 4.0.

Unfortunately, out of the 6-8 people I've talked with, it seems no one in tech support has much experience with the product, and there is very little means of communication as to what bugs are being worked on, when they will be fixed, or even if they will be. I'll try to summarize some of the main concerns I have with Forms 4.0 as a production-worthy graphical application tool. (lack of good support is my #1 gripe...I'll get to a couple others later...)

As a little background, I have been working on v4.0.11 and v4.0.12 on MS Windows, as well as 4.0.11 on Solaris (VERY impatiently awaiting 4.0.12 on Solaris).

First, a Good point:

I'll have to admit that the biggest concern was the "resource hog" problem in MS Windows with 4.0.11 -- and is seemingly fixed with 4.0.12! The "slow response" (due in part to the resource utilization problems) has been sped up quite a lot, and several little quirks that I (and most likely a lot of other users) reported were fixed in 4.0.12... I was impressed.. but really need them fixed for the Solaris version before I can give the same go-ahead for the Motif version as well.

I believe Oracle was originally designed for larger systems than PC's so of course there are going to be a lot of complaints when a PC has to have at least 16M of memory. The problem is, when implementing a system in Forms 4.0 on a larger machine with lots of users, where response time even in 3.0 forms are a concern. 4.0 is a large application, and I'm afraid to see what happens when hundreds of users begin using it on a single machine. The distributed nature of it running on lots of PCs poses less of a problem. So far my experience with the 4.0.11 version of Solaris is better than the MS Windows 4.0.11, but still not good enough for actual production.

Solaris Motif Version gripes:

#1. Every Window is painted over in about 5 different steps, each time it is brought up.

#2. When external forms are called, for some reason there is a lot of overhead in disabling the windows on the current form before actually attempting to call the external one (this constututes a lot of re-sizing, re-drawing, and finally calling the external form, which in turn has to go over the 5 steps of painting a screen.)

This is by far the slowest graphical application I have ever seen, and I hate to take my two months of solid work out to users and have them sit and watch the screen for 30 seconds every time it paints each window, and think it is because of ineficiencies in my work. I run this over a network, not on a local workstation, so maybe the Oracle developers never tried it over a network (if that is the problem)...who knows!

SPEED is what users want... less resource utilization usually helps a lot with speed, but lack of speed really turns users (and especially developers!) off. It almost seems to me that there was a great lack of real MS Windows/X-Windows gurus working on 4.0 development, and there are a lot of quirks in the development environment...which I'd imagine will eventually be worked out, but, Oracle, you will be killed by 3rd party software (who are truly already ahead in the capabilities of their graphical forms tools) if you can't make 4.0 into a truly fast and efficient product.

• - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Sean_Stasica_at_stortek.com
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