Saturday, June 26, 2010

Replacing Apex? More like Find and Replace...

I was getting my daily dose of Apex blog posts when I noticed this advertisement:

I was curious, so I clicked the link and got the following page (http://www.wavemaker.com/solutions/oracleforms.html):


"Well, this is strange", I thought... it says "Oracle Forms" there in the URL, and in the illustration in the middle of the page, yet the advertisement and the page heading talks about replacing "APEX". There is also a claim that the latter "costs a fortune", but as we all know Application Express is a no-cost option in the Oracle database. WTF?

There is also a link to an 8-page whitepaper on "Migrating Oracle Apex Applications to Java" (http://www.wavemaker.com/pdf/Migrating-Oracle-Apex-Apps-To-Java-With-WaveMaker.pdf). This whitepaper includes the following screenshot:



As well as this table:


OK, so it is clearly Oracle Forms that is depicted and described here, but labeled as if it was Oracle Apex.

At best, this is a clueless mistake made by some marketing sod who did a global Find & Replace from FORMS to APEX. At worst, this is deliberately misleading.

In any case, it's just wrong, wrong, wrong. I don't know about you, but I would not trust a company that is either incompetent, dishonest, or both. I'll stick with Apex, thank you.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Small patch for the Thoth Gateway (Apex on IIS)

Just a quick note to announce that a minor patch release (version 1.2.1) of the Thoth Gateway is available for download. The Thoth Gateway allows you to run Oracle Apex applications on the Microsoft IIS web server (a replacement for Apache and mod_plsql).

The following has changed:
  • Bug Fix for Content-Length: Fixed an issue where the content-length header would be incorrectly set for non-AL32UTF8 databases if the page contained multibyte characters.
  • Set ODP.NET connection string attributes: Added option to specify additional connection string attributes in the DAD configuration. This allows you to fine-tune the connection properties. See the ODP.NET documentation for more details.
Upgrade for existing installations: Simply download the latest version, unzip the archive and drop the PLSQLGatewayModule.dll file into your bin folder on the web server.