Editing Oracle Forms (section)

=== Forms 4.0 ===
Oracle Forms version 4.0 was the first true GUI based version of the product that supported GUI elements such as checkboxes and radio groups in the Forms editor and at runtime.

Although not publicly advertised, a character-based runtime was still available for certain customers on request.

The arrival of [[Microsoft Windows 3]] and competitive products running under Windows forced Oracle to release this GUI version of Forms for commercial reasons.  Forms 4.0 accompanied Oracle database version 6 with support for [[Microsoft Windows]] and X Windows. 

A new [[integrated development environment|IDE]] was introduced in this version.  Each type of object had an editor window that was optimized for it, so the field editor looked quite different to the window editor.  These would be abandoned in the next release and replaced with property sheets that were made popular with Visual Basic.

The 4.0 source files were  *.FMB for forms, *.PLL for libraries and *.OLB for object libraries the 4.0 runtime files were *.FMX for forms, *.PLX for libraries. *.OLB files were compiled into the FMX.

The [[Oracle Financials]] software suite did not use this version of Forms and instead continued to use Forms 2.3.