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New Hope for Old Oracle Forms Apps


Vgo’s Evo automates conversion of legacy applications for Web

By P. J. Connolly
January 1, 2007 — 
One of the headaches of transitioning enterprise applications from a client/server model into Web services is the sheer volume of translation work required. But can such a process be automated?

Vgo Software argues that it can. The company is a 2005 spin-off of professional services firm NEOS, which developed the Evo forms conversion tool after manually updating hundreds of Oracle Forms applications for its clients. Evo—formerly known as Vgo4Oracle—breaks down legacy applications into business logic, data access and user interface layers, and provides insights into code structure that a developer can use to make informed choices when deciding how an application can best be modernized.

Vgo CTO Rob Nocera explained, “We aim to produce a true J2EE application, in a multitiered architecture, using J2EE best practices…this is an opportunity for you to redesign your application, to consolidate some things, find out what’s redundant.” He continued, “We’ve done conversions where there’s 70 queries going against the same table and they’re spread across as little as 10 forms; you can imagine [what comes up in an application] with a hundred or a thousand forms.”

Evo was released at the end of November; pricing scales according to the number of forms to be converted. It can convert Oracle Forms to JavaServer Faces with Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces or Apache MyFaces, as well as JSP (JavaServer Pages)/Struts and Swing applications. Developers can use ADF Faces with Oracle’s ADF for Telnet and Industrial Telnet Server (ADFT/ITS) to upgrade applications that rely on a myriad of dumb sensors or other legacy hardware. At the data persistence layer, EJB and JDBC with POJO (Plain Old Java Objects) conversions are available.

Evo’s template architecture allows developers to create custom translations for proprietary and other frameworks if required. The process allows developers to ensure that the converted code conforms to existing standards at the earliest possible point.

Vgo doesn’t promise miracles; the company estimates that between one-quarter and one-half of PL/SQL statements in an application will still require some manual reworking, although it expects to convert at least 80 percent of the overall Forms code.

The company also advises that the target platform affects how easily an application will convert; for example, a Swing conversion may well be easier than one to a pure Web application, and the only thing simpler would be a conversion to Oracle Web Forms. Converted code is not stripped from the source but simply commented out; this makes referencing by future developers easy.


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