Re: Is Forms 4.0 stable?

I don't want to butcher this, so I will leave his response unedited with my comments embedded. This will be long, so if you aren't interested, hit 'n' now ...  

In article <des.29.2D71F46E_at_helix.nih.gov> des_at_helix.nih.gov (David E. Scheim) writes:
>In article <94040.100631SCUNNANE_at_ESTEC.BITNET> SCUNNANE_at_ESTEC.BITNET writes:
>>From: SCUNNANE_at_ESTEC.BITNET
>>Subject: Re: Is Forms 4.0 stable?
>>Date: 28 Feb 94 05:07:06 GMT
 

>>Does anyone have a soft copy of the article on Forms 4.0 in PC Week (31/1/94)
>>that they could post to this group ?
 

>>Also, has someone put together a full? list of all currently known Forms 4.0
>>bugs that is accessible via ftp ?
>
>I'm not sure whether it's proper under copyright guidelines to post the
>whole article, but I am providing below excerpts of note I wrote
>summarizing some points of this article as well as the opening few
>paragraphs of the article. (As you may gather, I'm not a particular fan of
>Oracle, going back to an abortive trial of it about five years back, a

First point, his feelings are based on a discredited story (see the response of the ONE customer quoted in the article, below), and a five year old experience. Less than 5% of all Oracle code is shared from 5 years ago, and very few of the employees who are here or who were guiding the company then are still with Oracle today.

>contrasting successful experience with another database platform, and my
>monitoring of others experiences with these products). -- David Scheim
>
> In a front page story of its January 31 issue, PC Week
>reported that Oracle Forms 4.0, Oracle's pivotal client tool, was
>buggy, slow, cumbersome, and fundamentally limited in its design.
>This has prevented Price-Waterhouse from attempting to deploy any
>mission-critical applications using Oracle Forms 4.0, even though
>the product is now in its 12th set of versions (4.0.12.1.10).

Actually, the story was about 4.0.11, which was the FIRST (production) release. 4.0.10 was a beta release. 4.0.12 is also now available. Every few months there will be new releases.

>This tool is "the crux of Oracle's Cooperative Develoment
>Environment product family, which encompasses all of the
>company's development, query, and CASE tools," PC Week noted.
>
> That Oracle's key client tool still doesn't work in its 12th
>set of versions is a troubling reprise of that company's past
>fiascos with buggy products issued with continually proliferating
>version fixes not always interoperable with each other, requiring
>continual upgrades for proper technical support. If such a tool

While this would hardly make us unique in the industry, it is not true. We *DO* issue patch and maintenance releases to add features or to fix important bugs. This is what our customers want. Of course, any customer would be happier with fewer (none) bugs, and I think that we are making good progress towards that goal. MANY of our Forms 4.0.11 users were happy and in production with that version, and it is a clear majority with Forms 4.0.12, released less than five months later. By way of comparison, those with a history with Oracle could consider how long it took us to get Forms 3 completely stable; those without a history in Forms could easily look at how long it took to fix products like Access 1.0, WordPerfect 5.0, PowerBuilder 3.0 (where is 3.0a?), etc.

>were to become the client foundation for any large distributed system, this
>would entail expensive and cumbersome installations and reinstallations
>at every client, a version control nightmare.
>
> Indeed, any client tool, even a reliable and stable one,
>with underlying software required to be installed at each client
>site would pose a major maintenance burden for each ICD. The net
>expense of such client software maintenance could far exceed that
>of the central database engine. Leading client tools such as PowerBuilder
>and JAM, in contrast, are distributed as small royalty-free executables.
>Such application distribution withoutan underlying software requirement
>presents a major advantage for a large distributed environment.
>
> In any case, if a company with a history of buggy products
>offers a client tool that is not usable for mission critical
>applications in its 12th version, is fundamentally flawed, and
>would entail an enormous maintenance burden for the clients, it is
>questionable whether that tool is usable in a production client-server
>system.

Well, the opinion of many customers is quite different. We have tens of thousands of production end users using Forms 4. One customer has 1,500 users up and running on hundreds of "screens" and reports. Another is running nuclear power plants with Forms 4 -- now THAT'S mission critical!

Below David's excerpt from the PC Week article is the response to it (unedited) from Dewey Allen of Price Waterhouse, the customer (mis-)quoted in the article.
>
>
>FORMS 4.0 PLIGHT HAMPERS ORACLE'S CLIENT/SERVER PLAN
>(PC Week, 1/31/94, pp 1,10.)
>
> Oracle Corp.'s push to provide its customers with a
>comprehensive set of client/server development tools is at risk
>because of problems with Oracle Forms 4.0, a Windows application-
>development package that began shipping last summer.
> Oracle Forms is the crux of Oracle's Cooperative Development
>Environment product family, which encompasses all of the
>company's development, query, and CASE tools.
> Forms 4.0 users are complaining that the software is slow,
>cumbersome, and limited in both windows functionality and
>database connectivity. . .
>
>/*********************************************************************/
>/* --- David E. Scheim --- */
>/* BITNET: none */
>/* INTERNET: des_at_helix.nih.gov PHONE: 301 496-2194 */
>/* CompuServe: 73750,3305 FAX: 301 402-1065 */
>/* */
>/* DISCLAIMER: These comments are offered to share knowledge based */
>/* upon my personal views. They do not represent the positions */
>/* of my employer. */
>/*********************************************************************/

In response to the PC Week "Forms 4.0 plight hampers Oracle's client/server plan" article which appeared on page 1 of PC Week dated January 31, 1994, the customer quoted in the article wrote the following letter to the editor to clarify the misrepresentation of their feelings about Forms 4. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- February 3, 1994

Mr. John Dodge
Executive Editor/News
PC Week
10 Presidents Landing
Medford, MA 02155

Dear Mr. Dodge:

PC Week's January 31 article, "Forms 4.0 plight hampers Oracle's client/server plan" by Mary Jo Foley contains statements attributed to me during a phone interview conducted by Ms. Foley on Thursday, January 27, which are incorrect and inaccurate and which misrepresent my views. Equally as important, these misstatements were used to support what I believe is a highly biased and inaccurate representation of Oracle's Forms 4.0 for Windows 3.1 product. In my professional opinion, Oracle's Forms 4.0 produc t is a today a strong and viable client/server GUI development tool. The current 4.0.12 release is fully capable of supporting both development and deployment of large scale, mission critical applications.

Concerning the "performance" issues, I also stated to Ms. Foley that Oracle's Forms 4.0 database interface performance was, in my opinion, better than all  competitive tools currently on the market. The performance issues that were discussed were limited to user interface elements.

During the telephone interview, I never made the statement that "forms sometimes crashes for no reason." I did state that we had experienced intermittment crashes with releases of Forms 4.0 up through and including the initial production release (v4.0.11). Throughout our beta testing of Forms 4.0 and continuing today for production releases, Oracle's World Wide Support organization has provided Price Waterhouse with timely and effective technical support for Forms 4.0. Oracle has corrected the vast majority of all "bugs" identified in each releases.

The most damning sentence, "The problems, he said, have prevented Price Waterhouse from attempting to deploy mission-critical applications based on the product" was a completely inaccurate statement. Price Waterhouse customer projects using Forms 4.0 are still in the design / construction / testing phases. That these development projects have not yet been deployed is not a function of the stability and performance of Oracle's Forms 4.0 software. It is a function of the complexity of the mission critical business applications being developed by our customers.

Database connectivity is not an issue to Price Waterhouse's customers. Our customers are uniformly using Oracle's Forms 4.0 to develop applications against Oracle7 databases.

At the end of the half hour interview, I asked Ms. Foley to provide me, before publication, with the specific quotes that she planned to attribute to me in her article. I provided her with my Internet E-mail address to facilitate this request. Ms. Foley agreed to my request but did honor our agreement. She left me a voice message after close of business (EST) on the 27th with para-phrased and garbled quotes. I returned her call the next day, January 28th, stating that I did not agree with these "quotes". She again left me a voice message after close of business on the 28th stating that the article had already gone to print.

I am very disappointed that, in the end, my views were misrepresented, my statements twisted and inaccurately presented to support a position with which I fundamentally disagree. I believe that the principles of journalistic fairness and accuracy require that you print a correction which presents my views fairly and accurately.

Sincerely,
D. Dewey Allen

Senior Manager
Price Waterhouse
National IT Technical Services Organization Received on Mon Feb 28 1994 - 18:02:57 CET