Java and Tomcat Updates : Vagrant and Docker

Yesterday was another update frenzy.

I already mentioned the update to VirtualBox 6.0.6 in yesterday’s post.

At the same time we got the quarterly updates to Java and I noticed a new version of Tomcat, so I downloaded OpenJDK 12.0.1 and Tomcat 9.0.19 and added them to my Vagrant and Docker builds.

If you are interested in this stuff, you can check it out here.

Remember, this is just my playground stuff. If you find it useful, that’s great. If not, there are plenty of other people messing about with this stuff. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) 3.0 on Tomcat 7

What started out being a quick dabble with Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) 3.0 spawned a bunch of different things…

First, I needed a fresh APEX installation to play around with. Most of the APEX stuff I’ve been using recently has been against Oracle 11.2 databases and I follow this kind of method. Standard stuff…

That’s fine, but the default installation of APEX in Oracle 12c multitenant environments splits APEX between the CDB and the PDBs. On the surface that sounds like a good thing. Installing APEX multiple times sounds like a waste right? In practice, this “shared APEX” situation is a complete pain in the ass and I hate it. So the first thing I now do on a new installation is to remove the shared APEX stuff. That spawned this note.

It’s actually a pretty important decision, because Oracle don’t support removal of APEX from the CDB once it has PDBs, so you will be faced with a bunch of unplugs and administration if you change your mind later. Having to decide up front if you may want to do something later is a total fail in my book. I hope Oracle scrap this shared APEX setup. I would prefer to see people create a new PDB from the seed, install APEX into it and use that as a seed for new PDBs. Effectively building their own gold-image seed… That’s my little rant over. 🙂

Next thing I needed was a Tomcat installation. Despite the ORDS 3.0 documentation suggesting Tomcat 7, I started with Tomcat 8. Word to the wise, it doesn’t work, at least not by just following the ORDS install docs anyway.

Since I was having problems with the ORDS installation on Tomcat 8, I switched back to the recommended Tomcat 7. This wasn’t so much a case of RTFM as a case of BTFM. The “B” is for Believe. 🙂

Once I switched to Tomcat 7, the ORDS installation went just fine. Here is a note about that…

So now we are four articles in and I’m just about able to start the thing I wanted to actually test. 🙂 Like I said, a quick dabble spawned a bunch of different things… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…