Kscope and its APEX Legacy

This blog post is dedicated to the recent and untimely passing of our dear friend and mentor, Joel Kallman. 

This year at Kscope, I find myself reflecting a lot about the APEX Community. APEX began about the same time that we started trying to build up our Modern Development track (originally ADF), and back then, they were roughly around the same size– until passion struck. 

Just the sheer excitement of the APEX product managers (such as the late but AMAZING Joel Kallman), partners such as Insum, and volunteers such as Roel Hartman, brought that community to life in an explosion. 

As many of us saw at the Sunday Symposium, hundreds of people virtually connected in the middle of their day to learn about the next generation of APEX. 

It is times like this when we all think of Joel Kallman, who was instrumental in bringing about this APEX revolution from a product development standpoint and inspiring all of us with his deep passion, and excitement. 

Joel’s tradition was to take a picture of the audience with their hands up when he was presenting. And with each coming year, you saw the audiences grow larger and larger and larger. 

We, at AuraPlayer, have a very interesting relationship with the APEX community. In the past, it was pretty combative with the now-famous “Oracle Forms vs. Apex” battle.  

At AuraPlayer, we’ve always believed in moving into the next generation while leveraging legacy investments, instead of throwing them away. This approach saves time and money and ensures the stability of existing applications.  

Joel understood us. Through all the discourse, Joel was a calming and supportive force. He spoke up on numerous occasions to voice that we are not the enemy, and explain how with our REST service capabilities, we are actually bringing the two worlds together. We will never forget him for that.

My last interaction with him was in Israel when he did the keynote session at the Israeli Usergroup Conference in February of 2020. It was incredible how he learned Hebrew to address the crowd, and he got a standing ovation for his effort. 

There, he gave me the idea to build a joint solution of AuraPlayer REST services behind APEX. An idea that finally came into reality when we, along with our partners at Insum, built it. 

Together with Insum, we took the Oracle E-Business Suite, Inventory Management application, to the next generation with APEX. The new application was finished in under a week and can be seen here. 

Let’s remember that it’s not really a battle or competition. It’s about understanding each company’s needs and maximizing that potential.

We hope you’ll reach out and message  Me or Elizabeth Pearl on the conference platform this week – or feel free to reach out to us directly here.  Because just as my relationship with Joel taught me, you never know what wonderful connections can come about when you’re open-minded to the endless possibilities out there.