In this continuing series of
installation cookbooks, we will look at a new and improved version of Oracle's
Application Server. This standalone release of Application Server, identified
by "10g (9.0.4)," enables you to deploy forms (and reports) over the web
without the overhead of installing the complete Application Server (iAS)
environment. This standalone slice of iAS is a huge improvement over its
predecessors with respect to ease of installation, required resources, and
complexity. Forms users who slogged through Oracle's confusing, inaccurate and
conflicting installation procedure for earlier versions of iAS will certainly
appreciate the improvements made with this release.
Oracle's official
installation guide for Forms and Reports Services is a much better written
document than what was found in earlier versions. Despite some minor errors
(Note to Oracle: does anyone there validate what is written in your
installation guides? Hello?), you can take what is written and successfully
install Forms and Reports Services in one sitting. On one machine. In one
afternoon. Using less than 1GB of disk space. It almost sounds too good to be
true, but it is.
If you are familiar with iAS
Release 2, the GUI interface presented by the management console will make you
feel right at home - including the sometimes non-working "Restart All" and
"Start All" buttons. During the installation phase, you may see one or more
components fail to start. Before exiting the installation, you can attempt a
restart of the failed component(s) - just do them one at a time. That leads
into some advice about starting the services via the Enterprise Manager console
- if Restart All fails, try starting components one at a time. Take a moment to
read the note at the bottom of the system components table about what a
grayed-out check box means. There is no sense in trying to start something you
have no control over.
If you are starting with a
relatively clean Solaris machine, you will find the installation to be very
straightforward. If you let Oracle do what it wants to do with reserving and
assigning ports, and if you already have your forms in a 9i state, after about
one minute of configuring two files, you will see your forms on the web. No
host renaming, no disabling of NIS, no inordinate waste of disk space, and no confusion
about who starts first and how with respect to the infrastructure and application
server. What you get out of this installation is, for the most part, exactly
what you got out of installing Oracle9i Developer Suite: a small, easy to
manage, self-contained forms services environment - which is exactly what
Oracle should have done in the first place with 9iAS forms on the web.
The next article in this
series will cover the installation of the 10g (9.0.4) version of the forms
developer tool. See the next page for the start of the Forms and Reports
Services 10g installation guide.
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