Converting Oracle Forms to Apex - Is it worth considering the Apex Forms migration tool?

Question

Friends,

I am looking at migrating a Oracle Forms (10g) application to APEX (3.2.1) and looking at options that would enable me to get to a stage where I can obtain a "first cut" of the Oracle Form within APEX.

Having got to grips with the Forms migration tool by reading this guide as well as this appendix and converted a couple of sample forms (eventually after making amendments to the xml file to create the application!). The results of the conversion were disappointing. I could have obtained better results a lot quicker by developing the page from scratch within Apex.

I appreciate that the Apex Forms migration tool is in it's infancy and I am working with the first release but other than some pseudo-project management abilities I am struggling to see any benefits of using it.

Am I missing something? Has anyone been able to use this tool to achieve an acceptable result?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I don't have any experience with the migration tool, but I am involved in a large Forms to Apex migration project. Since we started about 2 years ago, the migration tool wasn't available to us and we kind of built our own. But conversion is really quite hard to automate, except for the easy bit which is basically screen layout and items. So we have a method to generate first cut Apex pages with the correct items in (more or less) the correct layout, but then we still have a big job to do inspecting the Forms triggers and libraries for fragments of PL/SQL and figuring out what to do with them (some are redundant Forms-specific code, some are client-side validations that we need to rewrite in Javascript, some are business logic that shouldn't be in the UI at all and need to be moved into packages).

I think the main advantage the migration tool has over what we did ourselves is probably the "pseudo-project management", in that it gives you a list of things that need hand-converting and tracks what you have done. This would pay dividends in a large project like ours, but maybe not so much in small projects. For small projects I'd be inclined to say "let's review what the old Forms app does, redefine the requirements and build from scratch in Apex". You don't really want your Apex apps to look like Forms apps with lipstick on them!