Friday, July 26, 2013

Thoth Gateway version 1.3.7 available, including source code

There is a new version of the Thoth Gateway, a mod_plsql replacement for IIS, available for download. The latest version is 1.3.7.

This version also includes the source code for the gateway. The project has been "open source" (under a BSD license) since day 1, but I never got around to actually publishing the source code, until now that is! :-)



This version fixes an issue with page rendering that was only impacting Apex 4.2 installations. Thanks to Patrick and Christian on the Apex developer team who responded quickly to my inquiries about the underlying changes in Apex that caused this problem to appear (the problem was caused by improper CGI setup in IIS/Thoth, not a problem with Apex itself).

Note also that this version removes support for OWA basic authentication (see the release notes in the downloaded archive for details). This should not have any impact on Apex applications at all (but may impact older, "pure OWA" applications).

Upgrades: For existing installations, simply overwrite the existing PLSQLGatewayModule.dll file in the "bin" folder with the latest version from the downloaded archive.

Roadmap for the Thoth Gateway


The goal for the next release of the gateway (tentatively called version 1.4.0) is to change the Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) from the "Unmanaged" to the "Managed" driver. By using the Managed (pure .NET) driver, the installation of the Thoth Gateway becomes even simpler, because it removes the need to have the full Oracle client (or even the Instant Client) on the system. Note that this will change the minimum system requirements from .NET Framework 3.5 to 4.0 (the version that the managed driver requires).


For Thoth Gateway version 2.0, it might be fun to implement RESTful Web Services, to catch up feature-wise with the Apex Listener. (The Thoth Gateway already has automatic SOAP Web Services built-in, though.) By the way, now that the source code is available, anyone can pick up the challenge and contribute new features to the gateway!



10 comments:

Shahana Shafiuddin said...

Good news.

Philip said...

Hi,
Can you tell me if Thoth has any issues running on Windows 2012 - IIS v8?

Morten Braten said...

@Philp: I have not yet tried it myself on Win2012 and IIS8. Let me know how it goes if you have the chance to test it out! :-)

- Morten

Philip said...

I can confirm that Thoth 1.3.7 works on Windows 2012 with IIS8. Looks stable so far under ODAC 11.2.0.4.0 & Oracle 11gr2

Anonymous said...

Also be aware that there is a fix required for running Thoth under .NET 4.0
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2673850/validaterequest-false-doesnt-work-in-asp-net-4
Apex passes HTML in the querystring (e.g. login page) when there is an error.

Ligon said...

Morten, once again well done.

I am very tempted to adopt this due to the neat way of doing SSO (rather than the clever hack we got at the moment http://jastraub.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/ntlm-http-authentication-and.html)

But the thought that Oracle won't be supporting APEX with Thoth Gateway is pulling us back (Company policy won't let it)

In Thoth Gateway version 2.0, along with the RESTful Web Services, it would be really awesome if you could provide an out-of-box functionality to generate web services from PL/SQL packages and deploy them in IIS (using Thoth Gateway) as REST/SOAP services. - OR is there something like it currently exist ??

Cheers
Ligon

Morten Braten said...

@Ligon: Automatic SOAP web services from PL/SQL have been available in the Thoth Gateway since version 1.1 (2009):

http://ora-00001.blogspot.com/2009/11/publish-plsql-as-soap-web-service.html

- Morten

Anonymous said...

@Ligon: I would suggest putting the point to you organisation that Thoth is just a DLL running on a fully supportable IIS7 or 8 server infrastructure. You can leverage all the benefits of IIS including support and the Thoth source code is available, which is more than I can say for Oracle's web platforms. I have a small team of developer's & admins, that cannot spend a lot of time getting to know every single Oracle technology - but Windows 2012 & IIS8 is a no brainer.

Unknown said...

Hi,
i just upgraded to APEX 5.0. Runs APEX 5.0 on Thoth 1.3.7?
I ask, because i get this Browser-Error after APEX-5.0-Upgrade:
X-ORACLE-IGNORE: IGNORE X-ORACLE-IGNORE: IGNORE X-ORACLE-IGNORE: IGNORE X-ORACLE-IGNORE: IGNORE Content-Type:text/html; charset=utf-8 Cache-Control:no-store Pragma:no-cache Expires:Sun, 27 Jul 1997 13:00:00 GMT Set-Cookie:ORA_WWV_USER_61817374465583=ORA_WWV-E40RS4z-aYiMaiDQitiuRAcl; path=/pls/apex; HttpOnly Set-Cookie:ORA_WWV_RAC_INSTANCE=2; path=/pls/apex; HttpOnly Status:302 Location:f?p=4550:10:110320606215856:::::

I never seen an error like this.

Marco

Morten Braten said...

@Marco: See my latest post at http://ora-00001.blogspot.com/2015/04/thoth-gateway-moved-to-github-now-supports-apex-5.html

- Morten