Oracle E-Business Suite on a Mac

One of my first concerns as a Oracle developer when considering switching to a Mac was if I would be able to access Oracle E-Business Suite. (Or Oracle Applications as many may know it by) Even though the official Oracle E-Business suite blog (http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2006/08/18/) clearly states that is supports it, I know from previous experience that it can be quite a mission to work with Jinitiator (the java tool required to access Oracle forms), especially if you are a consultant and move between different sites who uses different versions of E-Business, and more importantly different Jinitiator versions. From different versions of Jinitiators that clash, to Firefox that don't recognize it, to Internet Explorer crashing on me, I always had problems on Windows, so surely getting it to work on a Mac must be quite a mission right? Wrong! Since E-Business on a Mac only uses Java and no Jinitiator its a breeze to use, and I could access E-Business with Safari without doing anything, or installing any plugins!

Apps Login screen

Apps Navigation Menu

Find Concurrent Request


Shipping Transactions

Quoting Module


Workfow Monitor

After it was sooo easy to login to E-Business from Safari, I thought there is no chance of Firefox working so easily. I fired up Firefox and logged into E-Business again without having to install anything. Awesome!

Oracle Financials in Firefox

Something I did pick up though which is very annoying is the default assignments of the F-keys in Mac OS X. Since its the default way to search in E-Business with the F11-key, but in Leopard's System Prefrences its set to Desktop. The easiest way to get rid of this problem is to go to System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Desktop, and deselect it.

My conclusion is that it is even easier to work on Oracle E-Business suite on Mac OS X than on Windows, and I would recommend any E-Business user who is thinking of switching, to seriously consider it!

Applications Versions Used:
Mac OS X Leopard: 10.5.3
Safari: 3.1.1
Oracle E-Business Suite: 11i
Java: build 1.5.0_13-119
Firefox: 3.0