APEXBlogs part of odtug.com/apex

Over the last years things changed fast: HTMLDB became APEX, many developers started to use APEX day-in-day-out, the development team released APEX 4.2 a few days ago and the Oracle Cloud is using APEX as a key component…

Oracle Application Express (APEX) matured over the last 8 years and people blogging and using APEX grow exponentially.

In my personal life things changed as well; I co-founded APEX Evangelists (site no longer online), a company 100% focussed on Oracle Application Express (development, consulting, training).  I became a father of a great boy and a wonderful daughter and, despite my long working hours and many travelling, my wife and I are still married and enjoying our time together.

It has always be my dream to bring the whole APEX community together so we share our passion and experience. And I think the APEX community is doing great; from the first APEX Meet-up at Oracle Open World in 2006 where we started with about 10 people till the recent one of a few weeks ago where we were with over 100 people, over the many conferences, especially ODTUG where APEX is huge. I build APEXBlogs to promote APEX and as a platform to share our knowledge (or even to become “the” APEX Portal).

I gave it a lot of thought, and I believe I brought APEXBlogs the furthest I could in the time I had and to take it to another level, things need to change…

Below is a short history in the life of APEXBlogs:

February 05, 2008 - Launch of APEXBlogs.info

Goal was to have “the” portal for the APEX Developer with links to great resources
and a place to see all blogs that write about APEX or APEX related content.
It also acted as a public showcase application of an APEX application.

November 23, 2009 - APEXBlogs also includes twitter messages

March 05, 2011 - APEXBlogs v2 goes live with many new features:

• global search
• knowledge base
• statistics
• APEX Usage
• new links
• Plugins
• use of interactive reports
• use of google reader in the backend
• iPad compatible
• new theme

April 06, 2011 - Webinar - How APEXBlogs was built

 I explained how I built APEXBlogs and how things looked like behind the scenes

Watch the video on YouTube

October 25, 2012 - APEXBlogs part of odtug.com/apex

After more than 4,5 years APEXBlogs will move under the umbrella of a the Oracle user group ODTUG.

That’s right, APEXBlogs will from now on redirect to odtug.com/apex …

I believe there should be one Global APEX User Group in the world which has “the” conference and “the” platform where you find everything you need as an APEX developer. Don’t get me wrong, I still think having local user groups is very useful too and the official Oracle sites (OTN, apex.oracle.com) are a must visit for every person! But as things start to expand so much, it’s good that an organisation follows-up what is going on everywhere, and who’s better than ODTUG to do this?

I had many talks with the ODTUG board and I’m convinced the APEX community is even better served when everything is under that flag…