Preface

The guidelines in this book are intended to help you fully exploit some of the powerful features available in both Forms Developer and Reports Developer. Whether you've been using these applications for years or are brand new to these products, the concepts and suggestions provided in this book should make it easier for you to complete such tasks as deploying an existing Form or Report application on the Web, designing an effective graphical user interface, or tracking and managing the disparate modules that make up a single application.

How does this book fit in with the accompanying online help? While you can always rely on the online help to explain how to accomplish a given task or which options are available to you within a product, this book helps you determine why you'd want to choose one option over another and to understand the consequences of each decision. Use this book to help develop your strategy; use the online help for instructions on implementing that strategy.

These guidelines represent the combined experience of our customers, marketing representatives, sales consultants, and the Oracle Applications group. You may want to use these guidelines as the basis for developing your own company standards, or use them simply to augment the standards you already have in place.

Intended Audience

This book is intended for anyone who uses either Forms Developer or Reports Developer. The needs of both novice and advanced users are addressed.

Structure

This book contains the following chapters:

Chapter	Description
Chapter 1, "Managing Your Applications"	Explains how to use the tools currently available with Forms Developer and Reports Developer to set up and manage the development of applications. Topics include: Setting up and administering projects Enabling team development under a variety of networking scenarios Source-controlling projects Exporting projects between platforms Exporting projects to different environments during the application lifecycle
Chapter 2, "Designing Visually Effective Applications"	Presents visual considerations for developing Forms Developer and Reports Developer applications using Form Builder, Report Builder, and Graphics Builder.
Chapter 3, "Performance Suggestions"	Detailed suggestions for improving the performance of the your applications.
Chapter 4, "Designing Multilingual Applications"	Explains how to design multilingual applications.
Chapter 5, "Designing Portable Applications"	Discusses how to develop an application that can be easily ported across Windows 95, Macintosh, and UNIX. Also discusses developing for character mode terminals.
Chapter 6, "Taking Advantage of Open Architecture"	Discusses how to use Forms Developer and Reports Developer to: Create applications that include OLE objects and ActiveX controls. Customize your applications with foreign functions. Build and modify applications using the Open API. Run applications against ODBC-compliant data sources.

Notational Conventions

The following conventions are used in this book:

Convention	Meaning
boldface text	Used for emphasis. Also used for button names, labels, and other user interface elements.
italicized text	Used to introduce new terms.
courier font	Used for path and file names.
COURIER CAPS	Used for: File extensions (.PLL or .FMX) Environment variables SQL commands Built-ins/package names Executable names