Best solution for migration from Oracle Forms 6i to the web?
I work in an Oracle shop. There's a toolset that consists of roughly 1000 Oracle Forms (using the Forms builder from 6i, early 90's software) with Oracle 10g on the back end. It's serving roughly 500 unique people a month, with 200 concurrent connections at any given time during the work day.
Obviously this is something that needs to be addressed to get rid of the Forms runtime and move to a web based solution. The tools need to be accessed from Windows, Linux, various UNIX's, VMS and Solaris.
What options out there exist that would be feasible to migrate to? Not only does it need to be feasible for migration but the development will need to be done by 8 or so engineers who support the tool set (and many of which who would prefer to stay put and not modernize this tool set).
Oracle offers a few solutions that convert Oracle Forms into a crappy Java Applet (it's a very terrible temporary solution).
My solution of choice has been migrating to Ruby on Rails (which I'm a big proponent of Rails) but this will involve a learning curve (which we'll hit with any solution) for other developers. Also, the other difficulty in this is converting some very complex forms to HTML forms.
Has anyone tackled such a solution? Are there any packages offered by anyone outside of Oracle?
Any specific Java Web frameworks?
Would GWT, jQuery UI, ExtJS or any other JavaScript UI frameworks offer the rich user experience needed?
.NET is a consideration but a last resort (mostly because of license costs, there's no room in the budget in addition to what we're paying for Oracle licenses).
Answer
That's exactly what I am currently doing using...
The learning curve is much smaller than most web-based alternatives for Forms developers, as all the code is in PL/SQL (unless you start getting fancy with Javascript, which you can). Also, in the latest release of Application Express (3.2), there is a tool to convert Forms applications to Apex.
It comes free with Oracle versions since 9.2.