I stopped at the APEX kiosk at OOW and saw how far APEX has come. So I came home, installed Oracle XE and APEX on my personal laptop. I created some sweet applications and showed my boss. He said if I can get it running in our development environment using Weblogic 11g (10.6), then we'd consider using it to create new systems instead of making everything in Oracle Forms and using the htp package for mod_sql.
I have been working on it for two weeks and don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what else to do and am about to abandon all hope of having another option other than Forms or mod_sql. I don't expect anyone here to walk a complete Linux/Oracle server newbee through the entire process, but I'm hoping for some advice so I know where to go next.
Our 11g databases reside on one machine and our Weblogic server is on a different machine. So I can't create a stand-alone http server on the server that has the databases. I have to use the Weblogic server. I downloaded the apex_5.0.4.zip file, but saw that it needs a listener. I click on the download for the listener, and it takes me to the Oracle REST Data Services page. I downloaded the ords.3.0.8.277.08.01.zip and tried to follow the installation instructions. I seemed to install it and it says the status of the "ords.war" is "prepared", but it won't implement. I went to the "testing" links for the ords application and I just get 503 service unavailable errors.
I completed all the sql files in the apex zip file and it created the 5 new database users.
I didn't know what I should be doing with the apex_5.0.4.zip file. I unzipped it in the Linux tmp directory and when I set up the ords application, I had to do something with the <apex directory>/images. So I just pointed to the unzipped tmp/apex directory.
Then I read something about "If you are installing ords for apex, change the war file to apex.war before continuing". I'd start all over, but I don't even know what to do differently. I am completely lost and don't know what I should do (besides give up). I've never installed anything on a Linux server and haven't worked with Microsoft servers since 2003 -- when I switched over to being a developer.
They make it sound like such a great solution at OOW, but if you are ignorant on how your servers work, I guess it doesn't do me any good. And we are not moving all of our stuff to the cloud.