Sunday, November 16, 2014

Thoth Gateway 1.4.0 beta release 1 available

As mentioned in my previous post about the Thoth Gateway, a mod_plsql and Apex Listener alternative that runs on IIS, 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).

There's now a beta version of Thoth Gateway 1.4.0 available for download here. I've tested it myself successfully on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8.5 and .NET Framework 4.5. I would appreciate feedback from those who want to download and test it out on the same, or other, configurations.

Please note the following:
  • The gateway no longer requires an Oracle client installed on the same machine (the web server). Similar to the way the "Thin JDBC" driver works, the "Managed ODP.NET" driver is just a single file (Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.dll) that is placed in the same "bin" folder as the gateway.
  • The supplied web.config file includes a configSections/SectionGroup with the .NET 4.0 sections. If upgrading from an earlier framework version running the gateway, you probably need to update the config file.
  • The "requestValidationMode" attribute of the "httpRuntime" node should be set to "2.0" to avoid problems when Apex passes HTML markup in the querystring (for success messages and the like).
 Please leave a comment here, or in the Google Code issue log, if you had any problems or indeed if you were able to install and run it successfully.