Re: Oracle Configurator vs. Forms

I hope we are talking about the same 'configurator' product. Last I had heard, Oracle Configurator had been moved from the Oracle Technology product set to the Oracle Applications product set and was available as part of the web-oriented "order entry and order management" set of products. This does not limit the use to order mangement or finapps.

When you say "most are operational type applications", do you mean primarily heads-down OLTP data entry? Are there are lot of decision paths involved? I would consider using Configurator any place where the answers to 'page 1' would dynamically select a which 'page 2' or which specific 'page 2 entries' are to be displayed.

Yes, the product could manage menus and could manage a custom table. For this it's not my first (or even 5th) choice of tool in the Oracle repertoire. It's basically an extremely powerful decision-tree processor ... "If answer to A is x and B is y and C is x then call the following routine."

AFAIK, it is specifically designed to inhabit an area of a web page to assist users in component selections - typically stuff like "how many meg RAM do you want?" [answer in data checked text], "do you want a lan card?"
[answer in yes/no radio button], "which games do you want included?"
[answer in check boxes}. It's also great at taking that up one level "do
you want high speed email and web page searches?" [ expanding to lan card=y, minimum ram=256M, whatever ]. However, I'd consider it more an assistant to the controlling application.

Also, IIRC, the later generations of Configurator are only available for n-tier, not client-server applications. Received on Mon Apr 07 2003 - 19:46:13 CDT