APEX news: APEX 3.2, Forms migration, new blogs, OOW, Metalink

During the holidays the number of blog posts I write is significantly less. If you follow the other blogs or watch on apexblogs.info you've seen most of the latest news.

Nevertheless I thought it was a good idea to do a combined post of the APEX news of the last weeks.

The Statement of Direction got updated. APEX 3.2 will be released "soon". In this version mainly the Forms Migration toolkit will be included. To get good input and do extensive testing, Oracle is searching for sample data and beta testers. If you want to help making the FORMS2APEX tool a success, read the full story on David Peake's blog.

Every month I get a few requests to include new APEX blogs on the APEX Blog Aggregator. On ApexBlogs there are about 50 blogs aggregated, but not all of them are active (= still updated). The active blogs you should be able to see on the right hand site or in the slider of "Blog Selection" on the front page (if you click on it, it will slide down and show you all the APEX blogs). After a request of Noel Portugal, I've done some tests to provide you with a twitter feed of ApexBlogs. It seems to work, but I still need to do some code clean-up and make it nicer. I plan to provide you with this functionality in September. I'm using twitter more often myself now too, if you want you can follow me there as well (I'm logged as "dgielis").

In the past I used Metalink often as one of the references for a scalable APEX solution. It looks like in the future we can't do that anymore. Oracle changed direction and is trying to eat their own "dog-food". So to be clear, it's NOT because APEX has problems... Joel Kallman explains it on his blog.

At Oracle Open World a record on APEX sessions will be held. Normally I create a conference scheduler for the APEX sessions, but this time David beat me and created it first. The app gives you a good overview about all APEX sessions and it's a nice example of an Interactive Report in APEX. I'll do another post later about the sessions I'll do and follow at OOW.

There's also a survey going on about the integration of APEX with E-business Suite. So if you're using APEX in such environment and didn't fill in the survey, take some time to do it, I'm sure Oracle will love it and be able to provide you with "more" in the future.

We're hosting another open European APEX Training Days, this time in the Netherlands. It's only a couple of weeks away and it looks like we'll have a good number of attendees. All information about that event can be found here.

And not APEX related... the Olympics have started and the athletes are incredible. Not to speak about the unbelievable opening show!