Oracle Forms to Java: A Two-Week AI Migration Experiment

An AI migration can preserve a screen's element count while losing its behavior and layout. In a two-week Vaadin experiment, Anthropic's Claude Code helped convert an Oracle Forms demo into a Java web application. Its first pass reported 183 elements migrated and nothing dropped, yet fields were reordered, a bordered group was gone and a radio button field had been flattened into a plain text box. The author, a Vaadin consultant, made the build verify layout automatically and added a rule that any block permitting insert and delete gets New, Duplicate and Delete actions; the second run handled those actions correctly. A stricter check that traces field-level decisions to tickets and tests remained a documented plan rather than a proven result. The experiment supports explicit acceptance checks as part of migration, with evidence limited to a demo whose PL/SQL logic the author calls simple.