Since this is the special Joel Kallman day, I thought to share a story about how document generation with AOP started at Oracle's internal APEX environment.

Today it might be normal for people to use APEX Office Print (AOP) to do their document generation in Oracle APEX, but back in 2017, it wasn't.

We were only around for two years and weren't as proven as we are today, but Joel really believed in us. On July 11th, 2017 I got the following email from Joel:

Two weeks later AOP was running inside Oracle, so every department using the internal APEX instance could start generating PDFs, Excels, and other documents.

Joel himself installed AOP and created an internal site to explain what AOP was and how to get started. Today the internal Oracle APEX instance is maintained by other people as it has become a very big instance. The single AOP Server installed by Joel in 2017, has become six AOP servers maintained by the OPS team, but I will never forget how it all started.

Just as Joel served the entire APEX community, we want to do the same and constantly push ourselves to improve. We want to keep Joel’s energy going by turning developers into rock stars. For us, it means making you successful in generating, editing, and managing documents and having the best integration with APEX that we can.

I'm very thankful for Joel. APEX Office Print is definitely more successful because of his support. We miss you, my friend.