Skip to main content

APEX Listener Confusion

I just downloaded and installed version 1.10.xx of the APEX Listener. After solving some problems - most of them due to "no need reading the manual", I've got it up and running. Now I can access APEX choosing from a variety of ports: APEX Listener, EPG, Apache's mod_plsql.

A few things are confusing me though:

1. At last weeks ODTUG was announced that the APEX Listener made it into production (the version number also indicates that status). But if you're looking at the official download site, it says: "The Application Express Listener is currently an early adopters release and is not supported by Oracle Support.".  So what is the - current - truth?

2. Reading the documentation (after all), I noticed: "The Oracle Application Express Listener supports the following Java Enterprise Edition application servers: Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1 (10.3.3), Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server 3 +, Oracle Containers for J2EE 10.1.3.4 or higher". The funny thing is that if you download and install the OTN Database Development Appliance (which is great btw), Tomcat is used as webserver. In the early (or earlier?) adopter release, also Tomcat was mentioned as an option (and Glassfish wasn't).

3. For a reason I haven't figured out yet, I can't get to the listenerAdmin page (http://localhost:8888/apex/listenerAdmin). Username and password defined in the tomcat-users.xml are accepted, but I don't get the nice admin page I expected (the same when running the /Config at first). If you have a solution, please add it to the comments!

The good thing is that the APEX Listener (on Tomcat) starts up as a breeze now and the APEX pages perform nicely!

Comments

Iloon said…
Hi Roel,

Officially Tomcat is not a certified listener anymore.
I do not say, it does not work, but I say not certified/supported.
So that means bugs will never be accepted by development. ;-)

Do you have log files available?

Iloon
Roel said…
Oracle changed the text on the APEXListener official download site: The Early Adopter reference is removed...
Morten Braten said…
"Now I can access APEX choosing from a variety of ports: APEX Listener, EPG, Apache's mod_plsql."

... and don't forget yet another option: The Thoth Gateway which runs Apex (and other mod_plsql applications) on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).

For more information and download, see http://code.google.com/p/thoth-gateway/

- Morten
Scott Wesley said…
I was able to successfully get to the listener configuration page once just after deployment - I had to make sure I had the trailing slash.

Now, I still get the pretty login screen, but subsequent to that - I receive a 404 because of a poorly formed URL.

I discuss it here
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1095296&tstart=0
Anonymous said…
Hi Roel,
as a matter of fact, this software is not yet production ready. It's buggy (fi it throws ftp500-errors every now and then) and the developers already announced a bug fix which until today never came.
As it stands now, you can't use EPG, at least not with Database links, as this combination kills shared server processes on the database, you can't use ApexListener for the given reason above and if you want to use mod_plsql, there is no tested and supported installation other than with the Oracle Application Server which is not for free at all.

Therefore it's still true: You have to wait before using any of the alternatives in real production.

Popular posts from this blog

Fix Interactive Report headers issue when using a Region Display Selector

When you have multiple Interactive Reports (IR) on your page and use a Region Display Selector to mimic tabs, you might notice some weird behaviour in the IR headings if you switch tabs. The headings are not positioned correctly and you get an extra empty row under the headings. It just looks weird and ugly. But if you resize your browser window, it all looks fine again (until you switch to another tab..) So can we fix this by creating a Dynamic Action that mimics that "browser window resize" event? Yes we can! Create a Dynamic Action that fires on Click of the jQuery selector li.apex-rds-item a . That should fire a JavaScript snippet :  apex.event.trigger(this.triggeringElement, "apexwindowresized"); So now a click on a tab not only switches from one IR to another but also fires that event that will "autofix" the IR headers. A simple solution for an annoying problem. This applies to APEX 5.0, I assume it will be solved in 5.1.

How to create neatly formatted Excel documents using PL/SQL?

If there is a requirement to produce output from an application into Excel, you would probably create a CSV (Comma Separated File) with the data and start Excel to show the data - at least that's what I did...until now. The drawback of this solution is that you could only produce data and no nice layout. But Excel is also capable of opening HTML-files and using this you could create Excel files with data and magnificent layout! Let me give an example: 1. Create a procedure to show the data in formatted in an HTML table. CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE display_emp_list IS v_emp_count NUMBER(5); v_empno NUMBER(8); v_ename VARCHAR2(50); v_job emp.job%TYPE; v_sal emp.sal%TYPE; v_bg_color VARCHAR2(10) := ''; CURSOR c_emp IS SELECT empno, initcap(ename), job, sal FROM emp ORDER BY ename; BEGIN SELECT COUNT(*) INTO v_emp_count FROM emp; owa_util.mime_header('application/ms-excel', FALSE); htp.p('Content...

Refresh selected row(s) in an Interactive Grid

In my previous post I blogged about pushing changed rows from the dabatase into an Interactive Grid . The use case I'll cover right here is probably more common - and therefore more useful! Until we had the IG, we showed the data in a report (Interactive or Classic). Changes to the data where made by popping up a form page, making changes, saving and refreshing the report upon closing the dialog. Or by clicking an icon / button / link in your report that makes some changes to the data (like changing a status) and ... refresh the report.  That all works fine, but the downsides are: The whole dataset is returned from the server to the client - again and again. And if your pagination size is large, that does lead to more and more network traffic, more interpretation by the browser and more waiting time for the end user. The "current record" might be out of focus after the refresh, especially by larger pagination sizes, as the first rows will be shown. Or (even wors...