Everyone should have their own local development environment. No matter if you write Java and that just means IDE and JDG, or if you work with databases. Not having it reduces your learning a lot. I have yet to meet a really sharp database expert who does not have a local personal environment. It also goes the other way around, you can usually guess if a person has it or not.

Yes, you can get a database by just downloading a VM or use apex.oracle.com or hack in a database your employer provides. But to be able to extend and really do all the things that should be possible, you need your very own.

I have before made one documented setup available to friends and colleagues. However with docker and automation being in vogue it was time to make the jump from VirtualBox and just a textual description to a scripted setup for docker.

Fortunately Gerald Venzl has done the heavy lifting and led work to get both Oracle XE updated as well as getting docker files for all kinds of good things published. Using that I got the database and Java installed in different docker containers. I then managed to extend the Having that readydatabase to include an APEX-installation and the Java-installation to extend with ORDS and make them play nicely. I rounded it off with a utility-container for SQLcl.

So with that it builds a complete development environment with the database (which of course includes SQL*Plus), APEX, ORDS, and SQLcl. All that is needed is to run a couple of scripts to get it going. Having a development environment that can be rebuilt in a few minutes is a great feeling. I knew I had to get to that point after my premade environment went belly up at DOAG in 2018. It went completely corrupt minutes before my presentation, making it for the most stressful presentation to date. Never again! Famous last words…

Anyway, take a look at my development environment setup on github.

When you have tested that, you can of course activate the REST-features as you have a complete connected ORDS-config.