Oracle Forms slowly fades away...

I have heard that sentence so many times.

It should be rephrased to "Oracle want their customers to let Oracle Forms  built applications to fade away". The reason for that is the there are new things, jDeveloper and other products that are in the pipe line to be sold.

However, there are very many business critical systems out here - in Sweden as well as in the world - that uses a stable, in production running Oracle Forms/Reports/Discoverer-application. The important thing here is business critical, and stable. Such applications are not taken out of service in an afternoon without a controlled, in-depth study on the cricital businesses processes that are supported by this application.

Slowly fades away is an understatement. The Oracle Forms/Reports/Discoverer-applications has always been fading away, let's say in 5-8 years or so. And believe me, when I say that there are many many applications in critical production systems that will be around for at least 5-8 years more.

There is a natural fear to exchange horses in the middle of the stream.

My advice is to isolate parts of existing Oracle F/R/D-applications and investigate what path to take, are you going to JDeveloper, Application Express or a mix of them both, or are you going to slowly move to JDeveloper, ApplicationExpress or Open Source-solutions? Or are you going to .net-thread?

The technical part of the matter is just the underlying part, the important thing is to get in place a technical platform for all your business applications, a standard to build applications upon.