Jan Carlin's Blog
A Swede in the digital diaspora

By now you have probably heard that the Oracle Application Server will use WebLogic in version 11. Since there has been quite a few questions about this both on forums and in emails to me I'd like to clarify the situation here.

First some background information. Oracle acquired BEA some time back and a part of that acquisition was the WebLogic Application Server. In essence WebLogic is what is usually referred to as a Java Container or simply a Java runtime.

Oracle Application Server is much more than a Java runtime. It serves up applications made in PLSQL, Perl, PHP, Java, Forms and Reports and many other technologies. Until now Oracle's Application Server has used OC4J (literally "Oracle Container for Java") as its Java runtime to serve up applications made with technologies like Java Server Pages (JSPs), Java Server Faces (JSF) and ADF.

In version 11 of Oracle Application Server we plan to change this part of the Application Server to use WebLogic instead. OC4J will not be used going forward. Instead WebLogic will take care of serving up Java based applications. The rest of the Oracle Application Server will continue to function as before.

Forms uses the Java Runtime (or the Java Container) in a very limited way. The Forms Server process is written in C and performs most of the work that takes place on the server machine. It does not use the Java runtime at all. The client is written in Java but runs in a browser and uses a Java VM plug-in, either Oracle's own (JInitiator) or Sun's so it does not use the Java Runtime either. The only part of Forms that uses the Java runtime is the Forms Listener Servlet. This Servlet acts as a message broker (for requests coming from the Forms client and for the response to those requests that comes from the Forms server) and makes it possible for Forms to run across proxies and firewalls. The Forms Listener Servlet will use WebLogic as its Java Runtime in version 11 of the Oracle Application Server.

This change is for version 11 of the Application Server only. We have no plans to retrofit Forms to run with WebLogic for current or earlier versions of Forms.

I just uploaded a presentation on new features in upcoming Forms 11g to the new Forms Modernization page on OTN. Here is a direct link to it for those of you who are inpatient: New Features in Forms 11

We (Oracle) just kicked off a new Forms related campaign. It spotlights the opportunities for modernization of existing, Forms based, applications that our customers are using, many on very old versions of Forms. See this page for more information.

Patch set 3 of Application Server (version 10.1.2.3), which Forms is a part of, has now been ported to a few more platforms. See this link for the details and for downloads. The dropdown will have the platforms that we have certified so far. The latest one seems to be Redhat 5.

We have finished the certification of Sun's JRE 1.6 for use with Forms 10.1.2.3 (patch set 3). See the Forms page on OTN for more information.
This means that a great deal of headache has been lifted. See earlier posts on this blog for some examples. Now the Mozilla Foundation just need to release Firefox 3 for the versioning problem in Mozilla based browsers to be solved!