Friday, May 7, 2010

ApexGen has a new home

My first open-source project was ApexGen, a utility to generate Oracle Application Express (Apex) pages from PL/SQL, in a fraction of the time it takes to create Apex pages manually (using point-and-click). I originally hosted it on SourceForge. However, since then I have started a few other projects hosted on Google Code, so I decided to move ApexGen to Google Code as well.

To summarize, here are my current Oracle, Apex and PL/SQL projects, all on Google Code:

  • Thoth Gateway, a mod_plsql replacement that runs on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). It allows you to use IIS as the web server for Apex applications (instead of Apache or the Embedded PL/SQL Gateway), and it has a few extra features as well, such as CLOB support, automatic Web Services published from PL/SQL, XDB integration, and integrated Windows authentication out-of-the-box.
  • JQGrid Integration Kit for PL/SQL, a set of PL/SQL packages that allows you to use the JQGrid component to display and edit tabular data in your Apex applications. It is faster, better-looking and more flexible than the built-in tabular forms in Apex.
  • ApexGen, a utility to generate Oracle Application Express (Apex) pages from PL/SQL, in a fraction of the time it takes to create Apex pages manually. With Apex 4.0 just around the corner, I believe ApexGen will be due for an overhaul soon, as the export files are likely to have changed quite a bit.

5 comments:

Dan McGhan said...

Morten,

You should consider creating jQuery Grid plugin for APEX 4.

Regards,
Dan

Morten Braten said...

@Dan: I have considered it, but I have not yet figured out how to deal with Ref Cursors in a plugin. The current approach (PL/SQL region) works pretty well for those.

By the way, I've worked on some enhancements to the JQGrid Integration Kit, so a version 1.1 should be coming out in the near future.

- Morten

Philip said...

Hi,
I have been trying to get Thoth to work with IIS7 unsuccessfully. Do you have any instructions for this yet? Keep up the good work, as it's a nice solution to a common issue. We run IIS & Apache, but I really like the NTLM feature.

Morten Braten said...

@Philip: I have not tried it myself yet (have not installed IIS7 so far), but I gave some tips in the comments section of a previous post:

http://ora-00001.blogspot.com/2009/11/publish-plsql-as-soap-web-service.html?showComment=1274601961615#c3293294652722734596

Hopefully this can help you to get it working. What is your specific error message/problem?

- Morten

Philip said...

Hi,
I have been trying to use the other instructions, and it looks like Thoth is working.. I can see it trying to connect to Oracle, but I get (in the log file) "Connected to Oracle 11.2.0.1.0, Executing SQL: alter session set nls..., Executing SQL: begin dbms_session.modify_package_state..."
then I get a .NET error telling me (on the web page) that the "Input string was not in the correct format". seems to be around the SetupOwaCGI -> System.Int16.Parse bit.