Oracle Forms Performance very slow on the internet

Question

Hi ,
We have developed a form application with forms Developer 10g and deployed it on a ORACLE 10g AS. If the user runs our application over intranet there is no any network problem or not any performance decrease occurs. However if we deploy our application over WAN or internet, the startup time of the forms become Very Slow.
What we can use to make it faster , is there any other tools we have to learn like APEX or JDeveloper , what is the best solution , should we forget the Developer for ever and starting with other tools with fast performance on the internet , if so , what we have to learn , please help us , its common problem .
any help please ,

Answer 1

Interesting thread....
You asked whether "Forms" is the right product for the job. Well, the answer to that question will depend entirely on exactly what functionality you need and your skill-set. One advantage of using Forms over other Oracle products is that, in my opinion, Forms allows you to create simple or complex applications very quickly, with limited development experience. The downside to using Forms however, is that it does use a fairly thick client making startup slower than other applications. Generally, Forms is not very well suited for Internet deployments although it can and has been done. If your goal is to use a product which is easy to work with and is appropriate for Internet deployment, you may want to consider Apex. The downside to Apex is that unlike Forms, Apex generates what I like to call static html pages. Meaning once a page is displayed for the end-user, the data on it remains the same until the user forces interaction with the server again, but in this case the entire page would be refreshed in order to realize the changes. In the case of Forms, any content displayed to the end-user can be change without completely refreshing their view. I like to refer to Forms as a living application because unlike Apex, it can easily respond to most user inputs and/or server side changes almost in real-time. If you want this "live" experience, Forms might be the way to go, although at the cost of some startup performance. Alternatively, Oracle ADF can also give you a similar live-like experience. However, ADF will require a broader skill-set (pl/sql, java, html, etc), whereas with Forms you could get away with only knowing pl/sql although java knowledge would be helpful.
The views expressed in this thread are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.