Wednesday 7 July 2010

Apex Listener has arrived

For those of you who've missed it amongst all the Apex4.0 hubbub, the Apex Listener that was originally mentioned as being a separate release, is now available.

I've finally managed to get it running on my new Windows 7 64 bit laptop, but that was only after fiddling with the pre-release version and having a few other semi-related difficulties.

I've gone with Glassfish as my HTTP server, using Oracle Glassfish Server 3.0.1


There is now a dedicated OTN forum for the Apex Listener, and I've added forum entries on these problems - which I'm sure along with other little nagging things - the Oracle development will get onto with Glassfish as time goes on.


1) My URL to open Apex Builder requires the slash at the end, otherwise no deal
http://localhost:8080/apex40/

2) Unfortunately when I try to re-visit my listener configuration page
http://localhost:4848/apex40/listenerConfigure/
I get the following error
/apex40/listenerConfigure//index.jsf not found

I'm fairly happy with the set-up, it was relatively easy to do in the end and the new documentation accompanying the release is vastly improved - but Tomcat is no longer supported, only OC4j, WLS and Glassfish.

So now to continue exploring Apex4.0

I must say I'm coming across some improvements to the documentation. Apparently when creating new workspaces for existing schemas, Apex4.0 no longer grants any roles.
From there I noticed that there is a new glossary describing item types. I think this along with the Available Conditions appendix is the sort of documentation that is needed to assist people new to Application Express - that and the context sensitive help within the builder, that is sometimes a little lacking.

I confidence that over time, like all Oracle products, this will improve. I wonder what they're thinking about for the next release...

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