Apex Meetup last Tuesday

Last week, we had the first Apex meetup in the Cologne area in Germany. We started off slow with a small group of five people :) . From left to right you see Uwe Mahlmann, Denes Kubicek, Jens Gauger and Erich Heinemann.


We hope to establish this exchange of ideas on a monthly basis. Let's see, how it works out. On the next picture you can see me (Dietmar Aust) on the right, too.

We were talking about the different projects and the different ways, in which we use Apex in our projects.

Jens also mentioned that there definitely is a need to show off more customer references on how Apex is used in the *real world*. If somebody researches different tools for their company, customer references and actual samples / screenshots / screencasts build credibility. David Peake recently blogged about large applications built with Apex. This will be definitely a valuable addition to the already existing resources on OTN, especially the community and partners page.

Another bigger topic was the generation of Excel and PDF reports, this area is still not perfectly solved using Apex out of the box. BI-publisher is very expensive and the other solutions are just too rudimentary.

It was a really nice place in Siegburg. I guess I will going there more frequently. Nice atmosphere and good food and drinks.












Hope to see you on the next Apex meetup. I will post the anncouncement here and on my website.

Regards,
~Dietmar.