Oracle Forms Reviews

The libraries and packages are all valuable aspects of the solution, as well as form building, and built-in core features.

Overall, the performance of the solution is very good.

The GUI needs improvement. 

The solution needs to add recording features that can be included on the fly in the forms.

The solution is very stable.

It's not scalable as a central product. It's a client tool, so you install it on your computer to add a development framework and you develop forms from that tool. After that, you can publish all these applications through the application server. It's not about serving a certain number of users. There is no limit because you just have to install it on each machine.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's quite easy.

Users should be able to implement the solution themselves.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

My advice for others considering implementation is that you have to do some programming for mobile to ensure your forms will be following good practice and your code will be usable.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

It has been around for a long time and a lot of companies are using it. It's pretty flexible for it's age. Reports gives you a lot of possibilities to do multiple queries. It’s really good, robust tool.

We do consulting for companies that are already using it, and we do enhancements if they want to add a report or a form. It needs to stay up with the times a little bit more. Everyone wants to move into web services and applications.

It's pretty stable. I don't do much on the database server, so if there is an issue, I give the DBA a call.

I don't think there are limitations. The reports and forms are just fine in the interfaces, so there is not much scaling to do.

I'm pretty pleased with the resolution. They are pretty responsive and we have not had any issues. It is going to be an antsy part of applications soon though, which is one of the reasons we are moving out of it right now.

I would look into the next technology. 80% of the technology in the Chicago police department is still on Oracle forms and reports even though they want to move out. I would rate it an 8 out of 10, however.

The best feature we've found is the ability to capture and display exact values in the database. That's exactly what the end user wants to see, because if they store something in the database that they want to retrieve later on, Forms is on the front end. This makes it easy to retrieve whatever was entered into the database before.

It's allows end users who don't have technical backgrounds to capture, edit, and later retrieve data in the database.

You can customize it way too much and it becomes confusing to control. You have different users who want to customize it for their purposes, so everybody is doing something different. Then you write a code, and somebody else has to maintain it, which presents challenges.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's stable and we can do whatever we want to do.

When you purchase Oracle Forms, you purchase a certain number of licenses, and so it works for a certain number of licenses. We have been able to add more users and licenses without any problems.

The initial setup is complex because our network is private.

Let's say that we spend a lot of money, but it's useful. We're willing to pay for that.

Spend time playing with it prior to purchasing it, and then make the decision.

There are a few features we've found very valuable in Oracle Forms. First, it's a very flexible solution. It also gives us the ability to provide a front end for the customer to access their data. Additionally, we can update our database through the application.

We've automated a lot of the daily administrative tasks through our applications. I go back to the old COBOL days as I originally programmed in COBOL. Forms is kind of like that in that it provides a standard method for us to provide those solutions to the customer again. 

In other words, we can tailor the interface, the GUI, so that when users go from one application to another application and to yet another application, it gives us the capability to standardize that front end for the customer so it isn't something totally new when they go in there. It gives them a comfort. 

For our bosses, it's a good thing that they aren't getting hammered by functional users saying, "Hey, what are you guys doing?" It's basically good customer service to have a product like Forms.

In the form itself building it, you can set up selected update functions in the properties. There are times where that gets disconnected. Essentially, what it's doing is it's pointing to a package in the database to go do its work. The functionality of that piece, occasionally, doesn't know what it is. The form no longer compiles, and you have to go back and redo those. That's the biggest shortcoming that I've come across.

It's been able to deploy without any huge issues.

Everything's been solid. We've had no big stability issues.

It's been scaleable for our needs.

We were using COBOL when I got there, then we migrated to Oracle. Forms provided a much better, higher-quality GUI for the customer.

I think the initial setup was fairly easy. Coming from the display-accept world in COBOL on a VAX-11/780, the biggest challenge was learning the tool. Aside from that, it was fairly simple to use. We had some training, and we took off and ran with it.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

Every Oracle product is expensive. Forms is no exception.

I would recommend training for your developers on the tool.