There's a new feature in the latest listener posted a few minutes ago that makes it easier than ever to get up and running thanks to Sun.   There is now a built in webserver thanks to Glassfish.  That means for desktop or testing there's no need to download any webserver. However, the same war file is still deployable as before into your webserver of choice.



Here's the 5 steps to get a fully functional web server running against APEX.

1) Download Here : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/apex-listener/downloads/index.html
2) unzip
3) type: java –jar apex.war
4) Then just follow command line prompts.
      - You'll be asked for the images location , admin and manager for the listener
5) When the browser pops open fill in the database connect information

Done.

Here's a couple of the command line options.

-Dapex.home=/path/to/apex : Path to the folder used to store the web container runtime,
                                             defaults to: ${user.home}/.apex/nnnn,  where nnnn is the HTTP listen port
-Dapex.port=nnnn : HTTP listen port,
                               defaults to 8080
-Dapex.images=/images/location : Path to the folder containing static images

In the doc see the "Using the Embedded Web Container" for more details


For the curious, what we did was embed Grizzly from the glassfish project , https://grizzly.dev.java.net .  This is a project designed for this use.  Embedding a webserver and servlet container for specialized purpose.


The other big addition is the java docs for the extension points.  More on that coming.....