Integration of APEX, ORDS, Tomcat, and Apache HTTP Server (APEXOTA)

About

For Oracle developers, APEX is definitely one of the most important platforms for web application development. Using PL/SQL as main programming language, Oracle developers, who usually do not have leading-edge knowledge of fast-changing web technologies, still able to create an attractive, user-friendly, data-driven web application in a fairly short time, with very limited resources.

The actual power of APEX is that it can integrate with other applications easily. For example, you have a PHP app, a Springboot app with Angular / React frontend, and some static web content. Now you want to add a new APEX app, or handling oracle database data through REST API. Rather than running each app in its silo, you can put all apps in one single system -- Apache HTTP server in the front, then Tomcat, serving data through ORDS and APEX, and Oracle database as backend. The stability, scalability, and versatility of each component can produce synergetic power for any company needs.

Part 1: Preparation

The following instructions can be applied in Windows or Linux OS. For demonstration purpose this setup is applied to a Windows 11 environment.
Create two folders
- C:\Download - You put all downloaded components in this folder.
- C:\APEXTA - All technical stacks will be installed under this folder.

Note
The versions of all components are constantly changing. I use the latest versions as of the time when I write these instructions. They could have newer versions now.

Download Required Components

Put all download files to C:\Download

Oracle AI Database 26ai for Windows x64

https://www.oracle.com/database/free/get-started/

Download the fie oracle-ai-database-free-26ai-23.26.0.windows.x64.zip.
Unzip it to a new folder C:\Download\26ai.

Oracle APEX 24.2 - All languages

https://www.oracle.com/tools/downloads/apex-downloads.html

Unzip the file to C:\APEXOTA. It will create the apex folder under it.

Oracle REST Data Services 25.4

https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/rest-data-services-downloads.html

Download the file ords-25.4.0.364.1739.zip. Create a new folder C:\APEXOTA\ords and unzip the archive to it.

Apache Tomcat 9.0.113 64-bit Windows

https://tomcat.apache.org/download-90.cgi

Download the 64-bit Windows zip distribution. Unzip the file to C:\APEXOTA. It will create folder apache-tomcat-9.0.xx under it. Rename this folder to tomcat9.

Apache HTTP Server 2.4.66-260107 Win64

https://www.apachelounge.com httpd-2.4.66-260107-Win64-VS18.zip

Unzip the file to C:\APEXOTA. It will create a folder Apache24 under it. Rename the folder to lowercase.
Install Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2017-2026 (runtime library for HTTP Server)

https://aka.ms/vc14/vc_redist.x64.exe

OpenJDK JRE 21 Windows x86 64-bit (zip)

https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=21&os=windows&mode=filter&arch=x64

Download the JRE file OpenJDK21U-jre_x64_windows_hotspot_21.0.9_10.zip and unzip it to C:\APEXOTA. Rename the folder to jre21.

Summary

7 files are downloaded and unarchived:
- Oracle database 26ai free edition
- Oracle APEX 24.2
- Oracle ORDS 25.2
- Apache Tomcat 9
- Apache HTTP Server 2.4
- Microsoft VC18 runtime libraries
- Java 21 JRE

files

Directory structure

Archives are unzipped to folder C:\APEXOTA:

| Next |

| Home | Repositories | Blog |

© 2026 by Christopher Ho. All Rights Reserved