Oracle Forms Position in 2024

It's been a few years since my last blog on the Roadmap of Oracle Forms in 2021, so I thought it would be good to see what has been happening with Oracle Forms since then. I wanted to see if there had been any important announcements or changes to the support of Oracle Forms, and here is what I found.

Support Changes

There has been a significant change to the support expiry dates for Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) 12c (12.2.x). The cover for Premier Support and Extended Support has been extended to end from December 2023 to December 2026 and August 2025 to December 2026, respectively, which is an increase of 3 years for Premier Support and 27 months for Extended Support since we last checked this back in 2021, that is a year's extension for every year since the last blog.

Image from Oracle Lifetime Support Policy for Oracle Fusion Middleware Guide (https://www.oracle.com/us/assets/lifetime-support-middleware-069163.pdf) – February 2024

Error correction support for Oracle Forms and Reports 12.2.1.4 ends September 2024 (Refer to "Grace Period" in the Oracle Support Policy – My Oracle Support Note 209768.1). This means you would need to upgrade to the latest version to continue this support.

Product Changes

FMW 12.2.1.4, which included Oracle Forms 12.2.1.4, was released in September 2019. You can see my blog from September 2020, which summarises the new features the last point release brought. Oracle has, since the beginning of 2022, started to release quarterly patches for Oracle Forms 12.2.1.4. These patches mainly consist of bug fixes, but this change in patch release scheduling seemed to be in preparation for some new Oracle Forms releases in the pipeline.

A new 'minor' release in the 12c family has been released. This was named version 12.2.1.19 and was initially released in September 2023, according to Oracle documentation. Included in this minor release, along with several bug fixes, are some new features/enhancements. These new features/enhancements seem to be to improve the developer's experience of using Oracle Forms Builder and not much to improve the user experience of using Oracle Forms. Documentation also states that to upgrade to 12.2.1.19, you need to be on either 12.2.1.3 or 12.2.1.4, so anyone on an earlier version will need to upgrade to the latest before moving on to the new release.

A new 'major' release, which will contain significant enhancements and new features, is in the works. This will be part of the 14c family and is planned to come in version 14.1.2. There is a heavy emphasis on runtime enhancements, but a lot of it is just trying to catch up with web UI to try and make forms look more modern. The Statement of Direction for FMW also includes Oracle Reports, which suggests Oracle Reports will still be included in the release even though it will not be supported, and no new features have been added since the 12.2.1.3 release.

Conclusion

For the last three years, there has been a new version of Oracle Forms 12.2 released, but not that much activity in terms of enhancing or improving Oracle Forms, with mainly bug fixes being released and a few enhancements and new features, but it looks like Oracle Forms is still here to stay for a bit with the support extensions of version 12.2.1.4, the introduction of 12.2.1.19 and the pending release of 14. So, for those businesses with a Forms estate and are happy with a client/server data processing application, there is not too much pressure to switch platforms, but it feels like there is a push to get these Forms estates on the latest 12.2.1.4 version to be able to take advantage of the new features and enhancements and stay in some kind of support. But for those businesses with a Forms estate that want to modernise and extend their applications and for the features and functionality that web applications bring, then DSP are one of the best for Forms to APEX migrations.

For more information, check out our Oracle Forms to APEX migration services, and if you liked this blog, check out our other APEX blogs here.

Remember to follow us on LinkedIn. We publish insight blogs on the latest technology developments every week.

Subscribe to Oracle APEX Insights if you want to stay tuned for more APEX updates.