Re: FORMS4 - Comments

In article <ingres.736076917_at_wambenger> rana_at_cs.uwa.oz.au (Ranadeva Peries) writes:

> Dear Oracle experts !
>
> I have to decide between Oracle FORMS3, Oracle FORMS4 and
> Gupta SQL for a development project.
>
> I would like to hear from people with experience in these
> products.

My site has used all three of the products you mention. We are members of the Oracle Tools Alliance and have had several months to experience Forms 4. Previously, Forms 3 was our standard interface; today we are using Gupta SQL/Windows 3 as our standard. Our situation features VAX and Unix Oracle servers of PC clients, using DECNet or TCP/IP.

> I would like to know more about:
>
> 1. Ease of use

Experience has a lot to do with ease-of-use. Perhaps we should discuss the learning experience instead. Forms 3 can be learned in about a week, but requires at least one month of constant use to accumulate a feel for PL/SQL and the flow of trigger actions. It is easy to write a bad form, with lots of unnessary triggers that re-engineer or circumvent basic Forms behavior. The different classes of trigger are most perplexing to the forms student.

Forms 4 is a direct descendant in a new graphical wrapper. Learning time is about a week, with 2 weeks to a month needed for comfort. The use of the layout editor's drag-and-drop feature simplifies creating the form itself; but the trigger rules and PL/SQL are the same. Because there are more widgets in forms 4 than in forms 3, i cannot say that it is always easier, although a few things, like master-detail relationship synchronization, are definitely easier in a big way.

SQL/Windows 3 can be learned in about 4 days, and the comfort level rises sharply after about 2 weeks of use. Although the windows message paradigm is unusual for most beginning programmers, it soon becomes apparent that a message handler is the same as a trigger procedure. Drag-and-drop simplify form creation. The SAL language is not as rich as PL/SQL, but its outline format and prompt-box are so well integrated that expertise is easy to acquire.

> 2. Facilities provided

Forms 3 has primitive graphical controls, as you would expect; almost any manipulation of the physical attributes of the screen image are a big chore. Database integration, however, is superb; most of the basic loading, validating and updating chores are automatic or table-driven. Most of the programmatic facilities are supplied thru PL/SQL, a dialect of ADA; the capabilities of its supplied functions focus on record handling and navigating thru the various parts of the form.

Froms 4 has a superset of the above. Because of the windowing environment, its features have been expanded to address the needs of a more dynamic display. It is still heavily oriented towards the oracle forms paradigm of forms- -blocks-fields. Due to the huge goal of offering version 4 on every platform, the widgets provided look native to the environment, but specialized  objects are not always available, or may behave in an unusual manner.

SQL/Windows is closely integrated to the MS-Windows platform, and all standard windows objects look and feel the way one expects. Unlike Forms, DDE features are built in. Integration to the underlying database is remarkably poor, in contrast to Forms; enormous programming effort is required in order to produce a Gupta application that works like an Oracle Form. This is because there are no built-in rules tying widgets to the database; you must write code to do everything. Imagine that every Forms block is declared non-database and you wish to present a single-row view of a table: that's Gupta.

> 3. Bugs ?

Every major piece of software has bugs. As the product matures, you have fewer bugs. Forms 3 is mature and very reliable. Forms 4 is brand new, still alpha-quality, and has lots of integration-type bugs. SQL/Windows 3 is fairly stable in native ms-windows mode; stay away from os/2 and the win/os2 interface which is not crash-proof and tends to amplify gupta's bugs.

> 4. Any major advantages etc ?

I have been a proponent of Forms 4 in my organization because I believed it would lever the experience we (50-60 programmers) have with Forms 3. This will be true someday, but not now. Forms 4 is not production quality under ms-windows. It is not rugged enough, and its feature changes in alpha and beta mode have discouraged us from building anything useful. Only time will improve the situation. In the meantime, we have employed Gupta as a substitute. Its advantage is that it works, it's easy to learn, and it has good "snap" under windows. When it works, a functional form can be built in less time using Forms 4, but so far its advantages have been eclipsed.

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Dave Mausner / Sr Consultant / Datalogics division of Frame Technology Inc
dlm_at_dlogics.com