Thursday, November 10, 2011

Running Oracle Apex Listener on Apache Tomcat

WARNING: This configuration is NOT supported by Oracle. You are risking it on your own.

Even though Oracle doesn't support Tomcat as one of the supported platform for Apex Listener, nothing stops you from trying it. Here are the steps to make it work.
Before you try, I assume you already have an Oracle database running with Apex installed on it.
If not you can download Oracle 11g R2 Express Edition from
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/express-edition/downloads/index.html
and Application Express from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/apex/downloads/index.html

1. Download and install Apache Tomcat http://tomcat.apache.org/ I have used Tomcat 6.0 before and for this blog I am going to try it on Tomcat 7.0. I have installed it on "C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0" directory port 8080 on my PC. If you have installed successfully you should be able to access it from your browser using http://localhost:8080/


2. Download Apex Listener from Oracle OTN website.  Latest production version available while writing this blog was Apex Listener V 1.1.3.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/apex-listener/downloads/index.html

3. Extract the Apex Listener and copy "apex.war" file to the <Tomcat Home>/webapps directory. In my case "C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0\webapps"

4. Open up your browser and start configuring Apex listener by accessing the URL listed below. Type in the password for APEX_PUBLIC_USER, verify database connection options and hit "Apply" button.
http://localhost:8080/apex/listenerConfigure

5. If everything goes well, you should be able to see a page similar to this. Don't freak out, Page is broken just because you haven't finished copying Apex images folder.




6. Tomcat webserver root folder is <Tomcat Home>\webapps\ROOT in my case "C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0\webapps\ROOT". I ended up copying Apex images folder to "i" folder under ROOT since "images" maps to "i" in apex. If you are trying it out in Unix/Linux you can avoid this step by creating a soft link to pointing to the images folder. After copying the images you should be able to access the same page with all the images successfully. If you got it correctly, CONGRATULATIONS, you have just configured Apex Listener on Apache Tomcat successfully.


I will cover Managing Apex Listener on my next blog post.

4 comments:

  1. what it mean that "INFO: No DB connection found for: /apex/not-yet-configured" when i run tomcat

    ReplyDelete
  2. why "This installation has not yet been configured

    Please consult your Oracle Application Express Listener documentation for instructions on how to complete configuration of this instance.

    This instance is using the following configuration folder: xxx "

    ReplyDelete