Preview Oracle APEX 3.2 - Forms Migration

APEX 3.2 won’t include much changes in the development tool itself, but there will be a killer feature added: the Forms Migration tool.

A lot of people are looking into other directions to replace their Oracle Forms/Reports or Designer environment. Till a few months ago Oracle themselves pushed you towards JDeveloper. A lot of people I spoke to were not that java minded and even started to look after other solutions (non-Oracle). With a Forms to Apex migration possibility I think a real solution is waiting for you.

The main reasons I believe such a tool has a big change to succeed:

• You want to keep your Oracle investments. APEX is living in the Oracle database so 100% ok.

• You want to reuse your Oracle knowledge. Forms developers know SQL and PL/SQL very good, which is exactly the knowledge you need for APEX.

• You want your migration be so streamlined as possible. Hopefully the Forms2APEX migration tool provides you with that. I don’t believe a tool doing the migration for 100% automatically exists, but you should be able to reuse a lot and get a head start.

• You want your Forms environment in a Web 2.0 way, which APEX is providing you.

As you could read on David Peake’s blog, the limited Early adapter is not going to happen, instead a normal Early adapter is foreseen. I’m not sure how the final screens will look like, but here’s alread a preview of the Forms to APEX migration tool! I recorded this video from Marc Sewtz presentation for the German APEX Community. I edited it and added some music. When putting the video on Youtube the quality dropped, better quality video can be downloaded in m4v format or swf format. You might want to turn the volume down or up ;-) Hope you like it!

You can see to the full presentation of Marc here (in German).