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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.

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