APEX Listener EA2 with native Excel Upload

Kris Rice blogged about the new version of the APEX Listener here and here. The APEX Listener will become the preferred way of connecting to APEX (before Apache and the Embedded PL/SQL Gateway). If you are not familiar with the APEX Listener, you find more information here.

To install the APEX Listener EA2 (0.10.56.22.08) on my Oracle Linux VM I followed these steps:

• Download Java SE JDK (before I used the JRE, but Kris told me the debugger doesn't work with that as you need the JDK for that part of the code)
  As a side note; now that Oracle and Sun are together, that website already has the "Oracle look". I wasn't expecting that so fast, but it's nice. The theme looks very similar to the APEX 4.0 Theme 1.
  

• Become root: su
• Go to the path you want java to install: cd /usr/java
• Copy the file you downloaded in that directory
• Change the permission of the file you downloaded to be executable: chmod a+x jdk-6u18-linux-i586-rpm.bin
• Start the installation process: ./jdk-6u18-linux-i586-rpm.bin
  If that is done you should see a screen like this and a directory jdk1.6.0_18 should exist:
  
  
• You find a complete guide of installing Java here.
• Next you need to download and install the APEX Listener
• The APEX Listener needs a webserver, depending the webserver you need to follow different steps. You find a complete guide how to install the webserver and the APEX Listener here.
• I already had Apache Tomcat installed on my VM, so I went with that and just followed the installation notes.
• Basically copy a war file to the webserver and change the config file
• I was interested to test the new Excel upload feature, to get to work I added following line to the config file (apache-tomcat/temp/apex/apex-config.xml)
  true
• Finally run APEX via the port of the Listener and create a new page with a File Browse item, a button and a report that queries the collection.
• That's it!
  
  

With the latest release of the APEX Listener you query the collection like this:

select *
from apex_collections
where collection_name = 'P1_EXCEL_FILE'

P1_EXCEL_FILE is the item name of the File Browse Item. The other thing to remember is to call your button XLS2COLLECTION or have that as the request value.

APEX Listener available for download

The Oracle Application Express architecture requires some form of Web server to proxy requests between a Web browser and the Oracle Application Express engine. So far you had following possibilities:

• Oracle HTTP Server/mod_plsql
• XDB HTTP protocol server/embedded PL/SQL gateway

Today Oracle made the Early Adopters of the Oracle Application Express Listener available.
It's an alternative that is offered for the above two and with APEX 4.0 it will become the first choice.

Below you see a slide of the APEX 4.0 presentation. It explains what happens more graphically.



The main reasons why you want to consider the APEX Listener:

• it supports file system caching
• it makes the printing of pdfs easier as the APEX Listener is build in Java and integrates nicely with FOP.
• support of multiple file upload, the architecture of mod/plsql didn't allow that
• you can add your own plugins to it
• it has a workload capture feature

As the listener is written in Java you need a J2EE runtime environment. The Oracle Application Express Listener supports Web Logic , Tomcat, and OC4J. My personal preference would be Tomcat or Web Logic, if you need more features.