We’ve listened to you, the Oracle APEX community… you love the FOS plug-ins, and so do we! So I’m thrilled to announce we’ve adopted the FOS plug-ins as part of our Plug-ins Pro Community Plug-ins offering. We will continue to enhance and support them and are dedicated to serving the Oracle APEX community. 

For a bit of history, a few years ago, FOEX (now part of Oracle) introduced a set of plug-ins called FOEX Open Source, or in short, FOS plug-ins.  Peter, Matt, and the team built 25 great plug-ins and offered them for free to the community, with the option to pay for support. 

Since Oracle acquired FOEX, the APEX community assumed that many of the FOS plug-ins would become native components in Oracle APEX in the near future. But as it turns out, this will take time to fully happen. Even if Oracle were to incorporate all of the FOS plug-ins into APEX today, many people would still not be on the latest version of APEX and would still be in need of these plug-ins, so it makes sense to continue to support and enhance the FOS plug-ins.

Building and supporting plug-ins requires thorough knowledge of Oracle APEX, dedication, and (huge) investments. It’s not just building a plug-in once and sending it out into the world. No, you have to think about security, scalability, multilingual support, best practices, and twice a year, test the plug-in against a new version of Oracle APEX. Things also change over time, going from deprecated APIs to new components and support for other features like CLOB support. So plug-ins must be kept up-to-date for as long as people rely on them.

Every year at United Codes, we invest more money and time into extending Oracle APEX than the year before. I consider myself lucky to work with such great people and a thriving community that pushes us to new heights daily.

Today at United Codes, as part of Plug-ins Pro, we have 45 plug-ins under our wings; 30 of those plug-ins are free, and 15 are commercial; all of them are supported. And I can already tell you that we won’t stop here…

We are here to support you, the APEX Community,  in getting the maximum out of Oracle APEX and making it as easy as possible to add new components to your own applications, but we also need your help. If you like and use the work we are doing, please support us by buying a support package or a subscription. The support fee that we collect allows us to invest in new tools that continue to serve the Oracle APEX community. Without your help, what we do is not possible.

Visit the Plug-ins Pro website for all the details on our plug-ins.  Check out all of the FREE Community Plug-ins here.

We have even more big announcements coming in 2024… so, stay tuned!