There are solutions designed to assist the automated Forms-to-APEX redevelopment. Oracle APEX, for instance, comes with its own Forms converter. The use of a converter is useful, because it parses the application and re-creates automatically a portion of the application. Generally, when looking for a conversion solution, we would probably want to pay attention to:

Oracle Forms to APEX Migration Process:

Analysis capability: the degree to which the entire application is taken into account, not only separate FMB modules. Two and a half decades of coding Forms lead to highly complex applications. The investment we have made so far is spread over FMB, MMB, PLL, OLB files, database objects and not only, and our converter should be able to consider all these objects in the migration process.

Reuse of investment: The degree to which essential application components, like the business logic, can be reintegrated in the new application.

Quality of the end result: can we easily understand and maintain the produced application? Is it free of proprietary components?

Forms to APEX Migration Benefits:

Summarized Main benefits:

§ Easy: automated migration of Oracle Forms applications to APEX technology

§ Well organized and clean code: the migrated application code artifacts will be identical to the ones that would be obtained by a manual rewrite, allowing you to easily further develop and maintain the generated application

§ No proprietary components: the generated APEX application consists of native APEX API calls and can therefore be integrated in an existing APEX installation without importing external components into the system

§ Investment protection: the PL/SQL business logic that has already been successfully implemented with Forms will be extracted and re-used within the migrated application.