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

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

Remember Oracle Forms? One of the nice features of Forms was the use of GLOBAL items. More or less comparable to Application Items in APEX. These GLOBALS where often used to pre-query data. For example you queried Employee 200 in Form A, then opened Form B and on opening that Form the Employee field is filled with that (GLOBAL) value of 200 and the query was executed. So without additional keys strokes or entering data, when switching to another Form a user would immediately see the data in the same context. And they loved that. In APEX you can create a similar experience using Application Items (or an Item on the Global Page) for Classic Reports (by setting a Default Value to a Search Item) and Interactive Reports (using the  APEX_IR.ADD_FILTER  procedure). But what about the Interactive Grid? There is no APEX_IG package ... so the first thing we have to figure out is how can we set a filter programmatically? Start with creating an Interactive Grid based upon the good o...

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...

Stop using validations for checking constraints !

 If you run your APEX application - like a Form based on the EMP table - and test if you can change the value of Department to something else then the standard values of 10, 20, 30 or 40, you'll get a nice error message like this: But it isn't really nice, is it? So what do a lot of developers do? They create a validation (just) in order to show a nicer, better worded, error message like "This is not a valid department".  And what you then just did is writing code twice : Once in the database as a (foreign key) check constraint and once as a sql statement in your validation. And we all know : writing code twice is usually not a good idea - and executing the same query twice is not enhancing your performance! So how can we transform that ugly error message into something nice? By combining two APEX features: the Error Handling Function and the Text Messages! Start with copying the example of an Error Handling Function from the APEX documentation. Create this function ...