This is just a cookbook version of a get to go of the oracle apex listener on a (windows) oracle 11gR2. Necessary resources comprise the (otn authenticated) installation and developer guide for apex listener (pdf) as well as the download area for apex listener (zip). Note that there is another installation and developer guide for apex listener that comes as html pages with the downloadable package. It does contain release notes as of august 2011 such that it should be more recent than the pdf version (as of February 2011). There also is an apex listener forum hosted by oracle, see the APEX Listener OTN Forum for any user driven discussion threads.
Me, i tested the standalone version of apex listener to be employed in some rapid prototyping developments, establishing an easy backend data connection for nowadays ajax-based web ui’s. Iff you go for some apex listener evaluations pointing to productive environments, do consider deploying the code with a standard j2ee container host.
The installation (and developer) guide is, as mostly with oracle, a well done step-by-step manual just to follow and this is the way i choosed to go as follows: Get the downloadable package from the resource above. It’s an archive versioned as apex_listener.1.1.3.243.11.40.zip to this date and contains a singleton war file along with some documentation.
I already have apex installed with this database instance and decided to extract the archive to E:\oracle\product\11.2.0\dbhome_1\apex-listener, pointed out as the “temp” directory, for whatever reason, in the installation guide. From this root directory i launched the war file along with some documented parameters to depict the deployment directory, the apex image directory, the http port to use, and so on:
E:\oracle\product\11.2.0\dbhome_1\apex-listener\temp>java -Dapex.home=E:\oracle\product\11.2.0\dbhome_1\apex-listener\runtime -Dapex.images=E:\oracle\product\11.2.0\dbhome_1\apex\images -Dapex.port=8585 -jar apex.war
The deployment directory, actually, is the place where the war file will be extracted to and where runtime information as well as configuration data will be written. Do not use -Dapex.erase=true iff you decide to follow my installation hierarchie, because doing so will erase all configuration data too.
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