Oracle Forms 10 running as application in Java Webstart

Many people miss in webforms the possibility to run forms as a separate application. They have a lot of problems to handle browser back button an so on. The good news - there is a way to do this with Java Webstart. The bad news - it is not supported by Oracle. But we run this since four years now and is very stable.

Following I show you the basic configuration for forms 10g. In later posts I will show you examples for forms 11g, how to handle forms parameters and further more.

Let’s start:

I assume you have an running unix or linux application server with forms 10.1.2. Put following code as webstart_10g.jnlp to directory <Oracle Home>/j2ee/home/default-web-app

<jnlp spec="1.0+" codebase="http://localhost.localdomain:7778/forms/java/">
  <information>
    <title>Webstart Test Oracle Forms 10g</title>
    <vendor>develishdevelopment.wordpress.com</vendor>
    <homepage href="null"/>
    <description>Webstart Test Oracle Forms 10g</description>
  </information>
  <security>
    <all-permissions/>
  </security>
  <update check="timeout" policy="always"/>
  <resources>
    <java version="1.6.0"/>
    <jar href="frmall.jar" download="eager" main="true"/>
  </resources>
  <applet-desc name="Webstart Test Oracle Forms 10g" main-class="oracle.forms.engine.Main" width="990" height="660">
    <param name="background" value="no"/>
    <param name="logo" value="no"/>
    <param name="serverApp" value="default"/>
    <param name="lookAndFeel" value="oracle"/>
    <param name="allow_debug" value="true"/>
    <param name="separateFrame" value="false"/>
    <param name="em_mode" value="1"/>
    <param name="latencyCheck" value="true"/>
    <param name="networkRetries" value="240"/>
    <param name="serverArgs" value="module=test.fmx useSDI=yes"/>
    <param name="serverURL" value="http://localhost.localdomain:7778/forms/lservlet?ifcfs=http://localhost.localdomain:7778/forms/frmservlet?config=jpi"/>
    <param name="colorScheme" value="teal"/>
    <param name="splashScreen" value="no"/>
    <param name="dontTruncateTabs" value="true"/>
  </applet-desc>
</jnlp>

Start java webstart with your jnlp url, here is an example in linux:

./javaws http://localhost.localdomain:7778/j2ee/webstart_10g.jnlp

Java webstart comes up with the standard test.fmx from the forms services installation:

Isn’t it easy?