The importance of being a slash

If you are scratching your head trying to figure out what's wrong in your configuration because you can't get to display any icons in Oracle Application Express, then you might want to know that a slash ( / ) can make a huge difference.

As usual in my case, for some unexplainable reason, suddenly i decided to relocate apex images and themes under the Apache/Apache folder.

In order to do so, i needed to modify the marvel.conf file at the following line:

Alias /i/ "path to the image folder in the filesystem"

Now, as my development box is a pc running Windows 2000, the file path is usually written using backslashes.
God knows or may be, on a slightly lesser scale, Bill knows, why on earth Microsoft, one day, decided they wouldn't be using the normal forward slash as folder separator.

So, at first, i wrote the following:

Alias /i/ "D:\Oracle\Ora101cd\Apache\Apache\images\"

because that was the folder where i copied my freshly installed icons and themes from the Apex 2.2 zip file.

So, when i restarted the Apache service i was expecting to see a plethora of new fancy icons but with great disappointment i couldn't see any!

So i began to tamper with that silly line in marvel.conf until i realized the importance of a slash.
When i added a forward slash as last character, as follows

Alias /i/ "D:\Oracle\Ora101cd\Apache\Apache\images/"

after restarting Apache once more, i could finally see all the expected icons and images.

Well, in the end much ado about nothing, but that syntax looks just horrible to me.