Forms not supported on Mac RISC

I'll try to keep the flaming down on this one...

I was just told by an Oracle Support person that Forms 4.0 was not supported on PowerPC Macs. This after asking serveral Oracle Sales and Tecnical people does Forms 4.0 run on both the CISC and RISC Mac platforms. This questioned was asked 4 months ago before I commited a major project to Forms 4.0 on the Mac.

To compound this I and others at my site tested the performance of Forms 4.0 in a two tier Client/Server environment on a range of Power Mac and 68000 Macs. All platforms worked well and nowhere in any doc was there any statement that the PowerPC Mac was a problem platform.

So much for the background.

Several of the projects required the writing of USEREXITS. My project needed to ask the user to select a file using the standard open file dialog box and get the IP Address of the client machine. Sound simple yes, NO!! Initially the code was written inside a MPW tool to remove any of the Oracle Forms overhead. The code was then ported into a USEREXIT and tested on a Quadra 800 and it worked well and consistantly.

This is were the fun part comes in...

The same userexited RunForms that worked on the Quadra exhibited memory/system error problems/crashes very sporadically. After reviewing the C code one more time I call Oracle support and was told that THERE WAS NO SUPPORT FOR THE POWER MAC!!!!! However it would be fully supported in Forms 4.5 sometime in June or July of 95. So much for my project.

So, next I called a friend within Oracle to find out what was really going on...

My friend has a friend who is on the Forms development team for the Mac and here are the facts as he stated them. What Oracle is doing is messing with system global variables that Inside MacIntosh says, "Don't touch". Shame, shame. Seems that Oracle got away with this on the CISC machines but RISC machines said, "Gotcha!!!". The gotcha can happen every minute, hour, day, whatever. When I ask how come Designer and non userexited Runtime works on the Mac the answer was "WE JUST GOT LUCKY". By the way MPW will not be the compiler used to write user exits it is now CODEWARRIOR. Oralce is now using CODEWARRIOR to write Forms 4.5 because it would take 3 days to compile Forms 4.0 with MPW. Says alittle about why Forms Runtime is 2.7 meg in size.

Lesson learned...

Oracle will sell anything they think they can make a buck on. Even if the quality is below industry standards. If they had just said in the release notes or heaven forbid the on the sales glossies they mailed to me that the Power Mac was not supported, I would have been disappointed. But now I've been f--k'd and my clients too.

What the real question I should have asked...

Q. Is CDE for the Mac supported on the RISC Macs?

1. No!

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I ping therefore I am