Newbie question about Forms Developer 6i

I am trying to learn Oracle. A book said you kind of need Forms Developer in order to play around with PL/SQL.

I recently installed Oracle 8.1.7 on my NT machine. I have connected to it with SQL Plus and it seems to work with basic SQL commands. When I try to hit it with a web browser, the Apache page comes up so it seems the web listener is working okay.

next I tried to download and install Forms Developer 6i. Well, it didn't want to let me install it into the same Oracle Home as my database. It gives an error that says

"the location is already used as an Oracle home for 'Oracle 817 Production'. It cannot be used as an Oracle home for 'nt'."

I do not understand what that means or whether that is a problem or not. I went ahead and installed it in a different home.

At some point during the installation a Windows message came up and it said there was "an internal error and a window I had open was closed," didn't say what window, but this did not seem to faze the Developer installer, which kept chugging away.

At the end, the installer told me that I had to configure the web listener with various virtual paths, and that there was an Internet shortcut to let me test a form. I tried the shortcut, it gave me a page with some fields to fill out, I filled them out and clicked, and it didn't work - couldn't find the form. So, I edited the Apache conf file to add the appropriate aliases, restarted the web listener process, and then tried the shortcut. This time, after I filled out the fields in the web browser screen, and clicked to see the form, it gave me a Save As dialog box to save a file called "ifcgi60.exe". What the heck is that? I was expecting a sample form to come up on the screen.

Any info would be appreciated. I just want to see if this thing is installed properly, and want to see the test form come up.

Thanks

Gary Received on Thu Jul 19 2001 - 02:33:16 CEST