Scott Spendolini's Blog

Joel Kallman has an interesting and amusing reaction to a recent Gartner paper authored by Mark Driver posted here .  After reading Joel's reply and Mark's paper, it got me thinking a bit about what was both in and not in the Gartner review and conclusions regarding Oracle Forms migration paths. But before that, let's consider the longevity of Oracle Forms.  Oracle has pledged support for Forms time and time again, and despite the negative stigma that Forms usually drags along with it about being an older technology, it's a perfectly good place to leave any existing applications and perhaps even build a few new ones.  Thus, if you have no immediate need to urge to migrate, then simply don't do it.  In fact, a new version of Oracle Forms - 12c - is already in development and will integrate with Fusion Middleware 12c. If you're a Forms customer and for whatever reason want out, there's a number of different options that you can take, all of which are highli...

As soon as I posted this entry yesterday, I thought of a few additional "rules" that probably should have been included.   Pitor's comment also spurred on an additional rule.  So without further adieu, here they are: Standards Learn 'em and stick to 'em.  Period!  Most modern browsers do pretty well with them, so the closer you are to them, the better off your site will be in the long run.   Ignore Old Browsers When Possible Take a page from the Apple playbook here, and simply stop supporting browsers that are too old, despite the fact that they may still be in use.  (I'm looking at you IE 6 & 7…)  Be careful with this one, as you may have no choice but to support some of the older browsers, based on your customers or potential customers.  We wanted to be sure to provide support for at least IE 7 and above, and that decision did add some time and effort to our design process.  We did this because some of our existing and potential customers - at least...

There's something to be said for corporate standards for browsers. Sure, it's almost always some flavor of IE, but at least you're only charged with making sure that your application runs and looks good on one browser on a single OS.  However, when designing a product, you simply don't have that luxury anymore. Your application must now not only run but look good on all popular versions of popular browsers: MSIE, Chrome, Firefox and maybe even Safari. And if you think that these browsers behave exactly the same on different operating systems, you're completely wrong. As we put the final touches on sumnevaSERT v2.0, I wanted to share some of the experiences that I went through over the past few months with regards to user interface - mostly so that you can learn from my mistakes and plan accordingly. Design and stick with a Design Pattern This is the most important step. If you skip it, or do it poorly, it will flow throughout your entire project and ...