ODTUG08 - Saturday

I got up at 5 AM in the morning, due to the jetlag...

As I couldn't really do anything I created some more statistics for DG Tournament and answered some mails.


After a nice shower I went outside together with John Scott to have a breakfast. It wasn't that good, so next time I might try another place or just stay in the hotel. It was supposed to be a famous beignet place, but I didn't like it, too greasy.

Before noon we had to go shopping, because John lost his luggage (it was BA who lost it). John blogged about, so have a look at his blog if you want all details!

At 12.30 I was expected for the community service of ODTUG. We went to a school and painted about 8 or 9 classrooms. It was nice to help the children after hurricane Katrina.


When I got back I changed, did some more surfing on the internet and went to the Speaker Symposium welcome reception. The reception was on the 49th floor of the Sharaton hotel. Pretty impressive view! I forgot to take a picture...

After that we met some friends: Mark Rittman, Borkur Steingrimson, Wilfred van der Dijl, Aino Andriessen, John and myself. We went for some foods and drinks. I'm sure one of them will post a picture of us!

Our supporters:

- Exchange 2010 hosting

New Orleans is a crazy place

After a long flight (and a delay in Miami) I finally arrived in New Orleans.
At first sight I thought it was a bit like San Francisco... huge lanes on the motorway, big buildings and water when you fly in. I'm not sure the water is still from Huricane Katrina or it has always been like that.

I met two Americans who loved soccer (!) on the plane and in the shuttle from the airport to the hotel, I sat next to some people from the Netherlands, who were ofcourse delighted that Holland won at the Euro 2008. Unbelievable who you meet at a different continent of the world. Here's a picture of the hotel, a few blocks away.


The weather is excellent, although maybe a bit too warm. It's already night and it's still difficult to get air. But I like it, especially when you know this morning it was raining in Belgium.

After having spend a few hours walking outside, I must say New Orleans is completely different then any other city I've seen! They are crazy here, especially on Bourbon St. :-)


John will arrive shortly, so we'll probably go for a quick drink and then time to sleep. I've been awake for 24 hours now... and start to feel it.

The nicest APEX app/features

I'm in the airport waiting for my flight to ODTUG Kaleidoscope at the moment.
It will be a long flight, from Brussels (BE) to London (UK) to Miami to finally arrive in New Orleans!

I'm doing quiet a lot of presentations this time:
- Sunday: Presentation of Use Case with one of our customers
- Tuesday: I'm in the APEX Experts Panel, trying to answer your questions
- Wednesday: My presentation of Charts in Oracle Application Express
- Thursday: APEX vs ADF Shoot-out, together with Lucas Jellema

The last presentation Lucas and I did last year in the Netherlands. We decided to change some things in the presentation. One of them is to include "the nicest app or features in both environments".

So, I thought to ask the community what they think I should show.

Currently the list I thought to chose of:

• Out of the box in APEX: from raw Data to Application and Interactive Reports
• "Web 2.0" extensions in APEX: for ex. ExtJS and Dhtmlx
• Integration with Webservices, Fusion and SOA
  
• Extending E-business suite with APEX
  (although I don't have the Oracle Applications Suite running on my laptop, so it will be hard to show)
  
• Integration with SQL Developer

I've about 15 mins to show the coolest, nicest features or application around, build in APEX. So it's not necessary to show things in dept or explain how to do them.

What features do YOU think make APEX incredible? Feel free to send me some screenshots or even nicer: real demo sites or an application export I can show.

I know a lot of the applications we build are "internal" only, but if you could make a subset of it to just show the cool feature, that's already fine. If you just want to share what you think would be cool to show, just add a comment ... there might be a chance I already did some testing with it.

Thanks... and see you in New Orleans!

Holland won, who predicted that? Look at this chart

When I was looking at the game Netherlands - Italy at the Euro 2008 championship I couldn't believe my eyes. The Netherlands won with 3-0.

Some people are betting on the game in DG Tournament and I wondered how many people bet that score! Instead of looking at all bets in a report I decided to create a chart.


In my presentations at the Oracle conferences (ODTUG, IOUG, OOW, UKOUG, ...) and on our Oracle APEX training days I often say that a picture tells more than 1000 words. So the proof is in this Statistics page again. Tell me, what do you find easier, going through the report or just looking at the chart?

In the chart you see all games and a bar which represent the betting of the game: Wrong, Good (means you knew who won) or Exact (you bet the exact score).
For the match Netherlands-Italy NOBODY predicted that score! It's easier to see it in the bar, there's no green and the red bar is the highest among the other games.

Some people asked me how to create a drill-down chart in APEX. The above example is a drill-down one. You can click on the bar and the Interactive Report and the pie chart will show only the details of that game. What you have to do to get it working is: create an hidden item and in the link of your chart you link the hidden item with the value (primary key). In the query of the "child" chart and report you add that hidden item in the where clause. Whenever you submit the page, the hidden item gets filled and the report filtered.

Show your visitors (based on IP) in Google Maps

During the weekend I extend DG Tournament with a Google Map of the participants of the Euro 2008 tournament. Although most people put in their profile the country they live in, it's nice to see where they logged in from.


Click on Map in DG Tournament to see it in action.

In Google Maps you can specify a place based on a street or based on coordinates. There's no standard way of showing somebody based on his IP. So I searched a long time for such a service. Most of the services are payable (and expensive), but I found one site which provides you with this service for free: http://api.hostip.info. If you just want to see yourself, you can also use this service: http://freeipservices.com.

Warning

Catching the IP of a visitor of your site is not easy and not fully proof. You've different techniques depending in which environment you're and what your server can provide.
It would have been nice if you could do it from javascript, but I don't think it's possible.

Implementation

First thing to do is to include the Google Maps code in your html page. Google has a very good API and documentation how to do that. Just click on an example you like, view page source and copy the javascript code to your own page. An onload event in the body let the code run when you open the page. This step will give you already the map.

Second thing to do is to add an icon on the map with the location of the IP. With the website I mentioned above you can transform your IP address into a longitude and latitude (or also called coordinates). I always try to use webservices, some kind of rss or just something that returns me xml which makes it easy for me to integrate in my Oracle and APEX environment. In the World Cup 2006 application I used webservices, in the APEX Blog Aggregator I used rss. The query to get the data for my blog for ex. looks like this:

SELECT EXTRACTVALUE (VALUE (t), 'entry/title/text()', 'xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"' ) AS title
FROM TABLE (XMLSEQUENCE (EXTRACT (HTTPURITYPE ('http://dgielis.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full?max-results=10' ).getxml (), '/feed/entry', 'xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"' ) ) ) t

I now wanted to do the same with the HostIp site, but that site returned xml with namespaces! It was a real nightmare to track down how to get the data out of that. As it was already a long time over midnight and having searched forever and having asked some friends I decided to do it the easy way: read the whole xml into a clob and do some replace and regexp_substr combination to get the data I needed. The solution was not fast and I didn't like I didn't know how to do the xml interpretation with namespaces as I was sure it was possible as I had seen it somewhere before. On Sunday I had a conversation with Mr XML, Marco Gralike and asked him the question. Of course after no time he gave me the correct SELECT to understand the namespace. He already blogged about it, so I'm not going to do that anymore.

But on Monday when I came in the office and talked with John Scott about it, he said: "Oh you didn't know that? I blogged about it before with my Google Calendar integration!"
Then you think: Doh! Why didn't I found it?
The answer: Because he used images and not text, so google didn't know it. When I looked at his post, I saw I even commented on it! So it must have been there I saw it ;-)

And in the post was exactly what happened with me: "If you ever find yourself having problems extracting data from your XML document, then always double check that the namespace isn’t the cause of your problems, forgetting to use the correct namespace can easily chew up hours of head-scratching and banging your head on the table."

So basically if you've your longitude and latitude you can give it to the javascript of the Google Maps code and it will create an icon on the map.

Integrating Google Maps, your IP and location is fairly easy if you know how it all works ;-)

Using Interactive APEX Report in a Fun way

You don't know Interactive Reports in Oracle Application Express yet? You miss something.
From APEX 3.1 onwards there's a killer feature included in APEX: Interactive Reports.

You can turn a boring report into an interactive one, where you can play with the data, do sums, averages, highlighting rows based on a condition, search and sort in an intuitive way and a lot more.

I didn't think about using it in DG Tournament until my brother asked me if he could have a special Bet ranking. He wanted to have a rank where he could see only his friends or the people playing in his group. I told him it was already possible by using the location field (which I also wrote in my FAQ).

It made me thinking... I also wanted to see in one view how I'm doing with the rank compared to my family or the people in Belgium or everybody. Another feature I wanted to have was to go back in time. When a game is played I adapt the score and the betting gets calculated, but wouldn't it be interesting to see what your rank was before the latest game and now?
Wouldn't it be nice if we could just save all these reports so next time when you login you can see it again?


All that and a lot more (for ex. highlighting) is now included in DG Tournament! And the good thing about it, DG Tournament is completely written in APEX, so it did take me almost no time to implement this new feature! I believe this is the first time the Interactive Reports make a use in a fun way, as this application is completely for fun ;-)

I wonder if non-APEX and non-technical people understand this feature. If you used the interactive report in DG Tournament, put a comment on this blog if it was difficult to use or if you found it fairly simple.

For the European people at ODTUG

Are you a football fan and don't want to miss anything about the Euro 2008?
But as a true Oracle believer you also go to ODTUG Kaleidoscope in New Orleans?

The timezones are different! So it's very hard to know what time they play the game.

Here's the date and time of New Orleans:



Here's the date and time of Austria and Switzerland (= also my timezone):



You still have to work out the difference in time? Don't worry, in DG Tournament I gave everybody the option to change the Timezone they are in. I created a special ODTUG entry, if you select it, the date and times will change in the New Orleans timezone.


Don't forget to bed on the games! It's all fun. If you had problems or don't know how to do it, I wrote a little FAQ for DG Tournament.

Oh... if you're worried where to see the games in the States... This is the reply of the hotel we're staying in: "Yes, we can get the European Championship Football Game. However, please keep in mind that the NBA Championship and College Baseball World Series will also be on – we can work around the events."

I hope the time difference plays in our favor. I asked to play the games of especially the 17th: Netherlands - Romania and France - Italy. They should be really good matches!

Euro 2008 betting - not possible? (DG Tournament FAQ)

I got some questions about DG Tournament more often. So here's a little FAQ.

Question 1 - I forgot my password, can you reset it?

You can reset your password yourself. Go to the Login screen and click on the link next to Forgot login info

You'll get another screen where you can put in your email address OR username. A new password will be generated for you and send to you by mail. You should be able to login with that password.

Please, change the password once you're logged in, in Your Profile.

Question 2 - I can't bet on the games as I don't see the games!

This is due to the fact you didn't select (subscribed) to the tournament.
After logging into the application, go to Your Profile and move UEFA Euro 2008 to the right side by clicking on UEFA Euro 2008 and hit the > button. It should appear like on the screen.
After that click on the Update Subscription button.
If you go to Your Bets, you should see a screen where you can enter your predictions of the scores.

Question 3 - I want to have a ranking for my company, school, friends. Is that possible?

Yes. You can see the people from one location by searching for it in the Bet Rank screen.
If for ex. all employees of Oracle Belgium want to see who's the winner of their group (Oracle Belgium company) they can put into location, in their profile for ex. Oracle Belgium.
During the tournament they can see the ranking of Oracle Belgium by giving that into the Search field.


If you want to play against your friends for ex. you can type a unique name in the location field.
For ex. "the shooters, BE". If you search for that you get a ranking only for them.

APEX Meetup at ODTUG08 - Tuesday 7.15 PM

It's becoming a tradition that on all major Oracle events we organize an APEX Meetup.

ODTUG Kaleidoscope is already in two weeks, so time to announce the next meetup!

As ODTUG planned to have a lot of fun, food, and networking events on all the days (which is great!), the only reasonable time would be Tuesday 7.15 PM. If you all agree we will meet in the lobby of the Sheraton hotel.


From there we'll leave to a nice bar in New Orleans. I don't know anything in New Orleans yet but if somebody has already a suggestion, feel free to put a comment on the blog. But I'm sure we'll have some people with us who have done some research the days before ;-)

Just to have an idea of people, can you please register your name on the APEX Meetup site.

Thanks... and see you very soon now!

Dimitri

Ruby loves me too much

The last couple of weeks I got quiet a lot of comments on my blog from one or multiple Ruby developers. Although my sites and blog are Oracle and APEX related and I more than once said that I'm not into Ruby, I keep getting these messages.

With the update of the Euro 2008 in DG Tournament it got even worse. Somebody posted in the shoutbox some "Rby Rox!" messages and other none for public material. I don't mind people saying they love Ruby as I do the same for APEX, but there are limits. I've never been on a Ruby site to say that APEX rocks, although it does ;-) To be fair I don't visit these sites as I'm not interested in developing with Ruby. I even don't mind people trying to convince me that another technology would be a lot better, if they give valid arguments. Posting 100 times that Ruby Rocks, is not convincing I would say. If there would be messages that Ruby is x times more secure because of ... or it's easier to learn... or it's more scalable and some figures around it, that's more convincing.

So I'm writing this blog post as these persons can now comment on this post instead of commenting on my other posts.

People are getting clever, they take your identity and do some posts... these days it's easy to create a login somewhere with the firstname and lastname of for ex. Pamela Anderson. The problem start when they start posting or mailing people with that identity. Are there still ethics?

So more about Ruby:
- There's a nice song which really describes these people:

And the text:

- Kaiser Chiefs Lyrics
- Another post I found about Ruby which got a lot of attention. To be fair I didn't read it completely, but one sentence is true: "There are exceptions, of course, but the attitude of Ruby on Rails users toward Ruby skeptics or critics has been less than kind. This is a crowd convinced that it has found the ultimate answer to everything, and they are not afraid to let you know. I only have a simple advice for these people: you might be right, but just be humble. It never hurts."
Of course it wouldn't be fair to generalize it for all Ruby lovers.

I'm an APEX lover and as long as I can do whatever I want with my favorite tool, I'm not likely to change...

Using Subversion in SQL Developer... Easy?

I find doing database development with Subversion a challenge. Maybe I'm not using it correctly, but at the moment I don't like the way it's working in SQL Developer.

For an APEX developer, SQL Developer is a real blessing, especially when you're on a Mac like me and there are not that many choices in this kind of software. The integration with Oracle Application Express is really nice, but that's probably worth another post.

Why would you use Subversion? If you're with more people on the same project, how do you control who's changing what? In Apex you can lock a page you're working on, but how about PL/SQL packages? Subversion can help you to keep versions of the code and have a control of who changed what and when.

I wanted to blog about the way I'm working with Subversion and really wonder if there's not a better way of doing things.

To start, what you need is a Subversion repository where you can connect to.
The connection wizard is working well. A screenshot of the Versioning Navigator, the Subversion tree and the properties of my subversion connection:


If everything is working you'll get a tree of directories and files which you can navigate.

So I've access to my repository of files. Let's start coding...

You can view the files by clicking on it in the tree of Versioning Navigator, but you can't edit them. You first need to check them out to a local directory and then Open your local files. I was really surprised you can't check out a file, you need to check out the entire directory! Once you know it, you get used to it and maybe it isn't that bad anyway.
It would have been nice if I double clicked on the repository, that it would give me the option to load the local copy, but that's not the case, you need to do it the hard way and open it by searching for it yourself in your local copy.

Once your local file is open, you've some possibilities like Lock, Update, Commit etc. the typical things I would say. First I do an update as I want to be sure I've the latest version.
A nice thing about Subversion is that it can merge files/changes. So when somebody else changed something while I was also changing it, after doing an update both changes got merged.

I'm changing my loaded package from my local file system and want to compile it into the database, but that's another difficulty with the current implementation in SQL Developer. You can compile your package, but the log window is not available, so you don't know if you've errors or not. That's very annoying... So you need to go to another window in SQL Dev to compile it properly.

When I'm happy with the changes in my package I update again and finally do a commit in Subversion.

The flow is not "flowing" enough for me...

Following changes in the implementation would help me:

• Get a visual indicator that somebody is working on a file from the subversion tree or in the database tree itself.
• Be able to do a compile and see the log window
• When double clicking on a package in the database or in the versioning tree have the option to load the local copy (linked to subversion). Automatically an Update is done, so I'm sure I'm working on the latest version.

How do you work with Subversion? Do you have some tips and tricks for me?

Sorry ...

Apparently my procedure for sending mails is not working like it should.

Yesterday I updated DG Tournament with the Euro 2008 fixtures. Today I used a screen in my admin module to send out a mail to announce it to the people who played with the World Cup 2006 app. The initial program, created in 2006, supported one tournament. At the end of 2006 it got rewritten to support multiple tournaments.

Apparently I missed in my mail procedure a parameter to only send mails for the current tournament (more technically in the WHERE clause).

I want to deeply apologize for the "spam" some of you may have had.

I will never forget a quote of Tom Kyte: "It ain't so much the things we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's the things you know, that just ain't so or just ain't so anymore or just ain't always so."

I thought my procedure of 2006 would still work ;-)

Have fun with Euro 2008 and bet

If you're a football enthusiast like me, June 7 will be marked in your agenda!
The start of the EURO 2008 tournament is coming closer. My country (Belgium) is not making part of the participating teams. I find it also a pity that England won't be there as I'm a huge fan of David Beckham. Some people don't like him, but have a look at this video from this weekend!



Although my favorite teams won't play, Euro 2008 will still be worth to follow! One of the matches I really look forward to is the Netherlands against Italy.

Do you remember the World Cup 2006? At that time I created an APEX application to keep track of the scores. It got extended so you could also bet on the games and that was so much more fun. Some people asked me to do it again in for Euro 2008, so here we are. A few weeks before the start of the tournament, I'm happy to say DG Tournament is open for you to play again!


I think it's an excellent chance to bet with your colleagues, family, friends or enemies ;-) You can bet on the games for free, it's just for fun. As this application was also created to promote Oracle Application Express, we give the person who wins the bet a free ticket for our European Apex Training Days in September in the Netherlands. But as the application is also open for others we also give you the choice for an iPod Shuffle.

If there are other people or companies wanting to sponsor, feel free to write me a mail or add a comment on this post. The initial goal is to have a lot of fun again, but if we can win something it's always nice too.

Good luck!

Local APEX patched successfully

This morning I patched my local Application Express installations to 3.1.1.

I went to Metalink to download the patch. The full APEX 3.1.1 installation is also available now.

Unzip the file and read the Patch notes. Basically I had to login as SYS on my 11g database and run apxpatch.sql. After 4:36 minutes my APEX 3.1 was patched to 3.1.1. The only thing left to do was to copy the images directory. This is different if you run Apache or the Embedded PLSQL Gateway. A few seconds later I was done.

Starting my listener and going to APEX in my browser and seeing it worked ;-)

Nice if everything is going so smoothly! Thanks APEX-team.

APEX 3.1.1 Patch set released

Joel Kallman just blogged that the Oracle Application Express 3.1.1 patch is released on Metalink.

As it's already night in Belgium, I'll have a look at it tomorrow. The full version will hopefully be available by then too.

There are no new features, just bug fixes. Time to update our servers ;-)

A lot of APEX at ODTUG and Sneak Preview

It's not that long anymore before Kaleidoscope is starting.

It looks like Oracle Application Express (APEX) is getting a lot of attention! Rumors are we might see some nice new things...

On Sunday there is a full day Case Studies, titled: "The Seasoning of Application Express – Must Hear Success Stories". Together with one of our clients we present "Oracle Application Express: Power to the People ", a non-technical presentation, but it will show how people adopt APEX in one of the biggest biotechnology company.

From Monday till Wednesday there are a lot (18!) APEX sessions:

• Building the New Stuff: AJAX , JSON, and APEX 3.1 by Carl Backstrom
• Advanced Oracle Application Express Tips and Techniques by Chris Ostrowski
  
• APEX Cheat Sheet 3 by Karen Cannell
• Creating Advanced Charts in Oracle Application Express by Dimitri Gielis
  
• APEX Development: Watch It Live by Bill Holtzman
• Creating Dynamite Applications with Application Express that Deliver by Kathy Hunsicker
• Explore and Benefit the APEX Repository by Michiel Jonkers
• Go Global with Oracle Application Express by Joel Kallman
• Writing a Custom Authentication Scheme for Application Express: A Case Study by Raj Mattamal
• Migrating from Access to Oracle Application Express by Josh Millinger
• How to Hack an Oracle Application Express Application by Anton Nielsen
• Oracle Application Express (APEX) Version 3.1 by David Peake
• Application Express in Support of Institutional Strategic Planning by Tanya Podchiyska
• APEX Hints, Tips and Best Practices by John Scott
• You Can't Do THAT in a Browser! Extending Oracle APEX with Third Party Components by Scott Spendolini
• Use the Power of APEX Dictionary Views to Increase the Quality of Your APEX Applications by Karen Van Hellemont and Jan Huyzentruyt
• Increase Your Oracle APEX Development Productivity with Open Source Tools by Patrick Wolf
• Building Advanced Tabular Forms by Marcie Young

On Thursday I'm also on stage for the APEX vs. ADF Shootout.
Together with my friend, Lucas Jellema, we'll try to show you both environments and talk when to use what. When we did this talk in the Netherlands in December it was really fun. The public at ODTUG will be very different, so I'm curious to see how it will go.
But some people warned me! I got told I will be in the ring with an opponent that is heavily prepared and is getting help from some smart people. Like in boxing, I guess in the ring friends don't count anymore... I see it as I don't have anything to lose. Everybody expect the ADF monster will eat APEX, right? I hope they will show mercy with such a tiny boy ;-)

As a lot of European people might not have the opportunity to fly to the States, my friends at AMIS are organizing an ODTUG Sneak Preview. This event is completely free, but you'll have to register for it. Some of the presentations that will be at ODTUG, will be hold on the event. As you can see in the agenda, I'm also doing one of my presentations.

Some people asked when I would be in the Netherlands, so you might catch me there. Or you can come to our European APEX Training Days in Utrecht in September.

European APEX Training Days in the Netherlands

It's starting to become a tradition... After our successful Oracle Application Express training days in Brussels (September 2007) and London (March 2008) it's time to announce our third European APEX Training Days. This time it will be held in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

The environment will be a bit different. We didn't go for the Plaza hotel, instead we went for a green "theme". The setting and architecture of the Mitland hotel make you feel as if you’re in the middle of the countryside! Nevertheless, it's only 5 minutes from the city of Utrecht.

Below you find the agenda. Depending feedback we might change some topics, but these are the topics we believe will bring you to the "next" level APEX developer.


You find more information about the training days at the website of Apex Evangelists.

Hope to see you there.

Vote for APEX, somebody gets worried

OracleNerd, aka Chet Justice, wrote a blogpost that his poll about "Have you used Oracle Application Express" doesn't have that many votes for APEX.

I believe he's getting a bit worried, so I decided to call the tight APEX community to vote for APEX on his survey.

Maybe the APEX users don't read his blog or the people who voted just didn't know about APEX... Even without the big Oracle marketing machine, I can't believe that APEX is still not that known. Application Express is getting more and more adopted, especially with Oracle 11g it's taking off. So, I don't worry that much, otherwise I wouldn't have founded a company only doing APEX ;-)

Lets give OracleNerd a warm APEX vote, so he also feels a bit better!

Sometimes you love you chose Oracle

The last days it's really hot in Belgium. Working when it's hot is not good for our brains and the computers as they get overheated.

Some people are distracted as they think about the pool all the time, some others get grumphy and some others make mistakes...

In the last couple of days I had to use the flashback feature of the Oracle database more than the last 6 months together. When you get a mail like: "I had to change something, but accidentally deleted the whole text. Can you please put it back?"

At that time you're so glad you use an Oracle database! Can you do something like this in MySQL or MS SQL Server?

SELECT *
FROM my_table AS OF TIMESTAMP TO_TIMESTAMP('2008-05-12 08:00:00', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS');

Another command I had to use for myself, when I dropped a table in development, but forget to look at the logic of an existing trigger of that dropped table:

FLASHBACK TABLE my_table TO BEFORE DROP;

I guess everybody already knew about flashback in Oracle (if not, Tim Hall wrote a nice compact page about flashback), but then I wonder sometimes why people ask me if APEX also runs with other databases... Oracle has to many nice features buildin, so some want to use another database I guess ;-)

I'm happy the sun is shining and I'm using an Oracle database during these days.

ApexBlogs.info updated

I updated apexblogs.info with a Blog Roll on the right side, so next to clicking on the arrow after Blog Selection, which would slide down and show you the aggregated blogs too, you have a link to all APEX blogs.

I also added support for Windows Live blogs. So if you've a blog like Jason Aughenbaugh, you can get aggregated too.

If you're also blogging about Oracle Application Express (APEX), but don't find yourself in the list, please put a comment on this entry and I'll add you.

If you don't have a blog yourself, but want to do a blog post with somebody or just share your ideas, that's also possible. Login to the site (if you don't have a login, create one for free) and go to Your Posts. In there you can write your blog post and it will be shown in the aggregated blogs screen.