So now that I have my Oracle XE database running, the next step in Project Ubuntu was to install AOracle SQL Developer (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/sql_developer/index.html). Normally I like to use TOAD (http://www.toadsoft.com) but that's a Windows-only kind of tool. Besides, SQL Developer is free and because it's in Java you can run the same software on basically any computer. It's not quite as complete as TOAD, which handles both development and administration tasks. SQL Developer is as the name suggest mostly aimed at the database development side of things.
Downloading and unpacking the SQL Developer files was easy (don't forget to make the shell script executable so you can double-click it from the desktop). But when I first attempted to run it I got the dreaded class-not-found exception. Actually I double-clicked it and got nothing, which is when I fired up a terminal and tried running the script manually so I could see any error messages sent to stderr.
Thing is the class it was trying to load was one of the built-in Sun Java classes. That's when I found out Ubuntu no longer comes bundled with a genuine Sun JRE. It has some kind of GNU-based JRE but of course none of the Sun JAR files are included. Thankfully we have Google and I was able to track down some instructions on how to install Sun's JRE (http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/142) into Ubuntu. These are a tad dated, Sun is up to Java 6 whereas the instructions are for Java 5.
I went ahead and used Java 5 anyway (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index_jdk5.jsp), I don't really need yet any of the Java 6 features. Plus I'm not certain whether SQL Developer (and JDeveloper which I'll be installing later) work with 6. But I know they work with Java 5 since that's what I use on my Windows PC at work.
So once I got those preliminaries done and had Java working, I was able to run SQL Developer without a hitch. It even somehow magically picked up my Oracle XE connection settings so I was able to set up a connection and test it right away.
Next up is getting the Oracle Application Server installed. That's probably going to take me a while so I'm saving that task for the weekend.
