Saturday, June 26, 2010

Replacing Apex? More like Find and Replace...

I was getting my daily dose of Apex blog posts when I noticed this advertisement:

I was curious, so I clicked the link and got the following page (http://www.wavemaker.com/solutions/oracleforms.html):


"Well, this is strange", I thought... it says "Oracle Forms" there in the URL, and in the illustration in the middle of the page, yet the advertisement and the page heading talks about replacing "APEX". There is also a claim that the latter "costs a fortune", but as we all know Application Express is a no-cost option in the Oracle database. WTF?

There is also a link to an 8-page whitepaper on "Migrating Oracle Apex Applications to Java" (http://www.wavemaker.com/pdf/Migrating-Oracle-Apex-Apps-To-Java-With-WaveMaker.pdf). This whitepaper includes the following screenshot:



As well as this table:


OK, so it is clearly Oracle Forms that is depicted and described here, but labeled as if it was Oracle Apex.

At best, this is a clueless mistake made by some marketing sod who did a global Find & Replace from FORMS to APEX. At worst, this is deliberately misleading.

In any case, it's just wrong, wrong, wrong. I don't know about you, but I would not trust a company that is either incompetent, dishonest, or both. I'll stick with Apex, thank you.

1 comment:

Christopher Keene said...

You are absolutely right - we screwed up! The white paper was written for Oracle Forms, not Apex and there was a marketing snafu where we thought Apex was a successor product to Forms, not a completely separate product. Thank you for your help!