Our Traust team is back from Kscope26 in Denver, where we spent the week talking with customers, partners, developers, Oracle product leaders, and longtime friends in the APEX community.
As always, Kscope was a lot to take in: deep technical sessions, practical demos, booth and hallway conversations, and plenty of moments where someone said, “Wait, I need to go try that.”
For us, the value of the week was not any single announcement or session. It was the pattern that emerged across the APEX track: AI is becoming part of real development work, modernization feels more practical, and expectations for APEX applications continue to rise.
Here are five themes we are still thinking about after Kscope26.
1. AI is changing APEX development, but trust is the differentiator.
One comment from Shakeeb Rahman of Oracle stayed with us all week: “Speed is no longer a differentiator in developing apps. Trust is.”
That felt especially relevant because “AI in APEX” no longer means only chatbots, SQL help, PL/SQL help, or generated snippets of JavaScript and CSS. Those were already useful. What is new in APEX 26.1 is APEXlang: a structured way for LLMs to help define and modify APEX applications directly.
That came through in Vincent Morneau’s “Inside Agentic APEX Development,” which showed AI agents working with project instructions, architecture guidance, coding standards, reusable skills, validation tools, and an actual development loop. The point is that AI becomes much more useful when the platform and process give it structure.
Martin D’Souza and Neil Fernandez explored similar territory in “Revolutionizing APEX Development with APEXlang and CI/CD,” while Scott Spendolini’s “APEXlang Deep Dive” showed how APEXlang can support diffing, merging, search-and-replace, Git-friendly workflows, and generative application development.
Anyone can ask an AI to generate code. Knowing the result will hold up over time is a different question. That depends on architecture, standards, testing, review, governance, and the experience of the people guiding the work.
That idea resonated with us for another reason: trust has been Traust’s first core value for more than 25 years. Literally, “Trust is our cornerstone.” For us, that made the conversation feel less like a trend and more like a confirmation of something we have always believed: trust is what turns technical capability into long-term value.
2. Large-scale application modernization now feels achievable.
Modernization has been part of the APEX conversation for a long time. Companies have been talking about moving Oracle Forms applications to APEX for years. With AI, that can now be done at scale.
There were multiple sessions over the week focused on using AI to assess Forms applications, map them to APEX, and clarify what should be automated, rebuilt, or handled with human judgment. Of course, application modernization is not simply a copy-and-paste exercise. Old applications often contain years of business logic, workarounds, user habits, and process knowledge. In some cases, a straightforward lift-and-shift may be the right path, but modernization also creates an opportunity to ask whether old screens and workflows should be refactored for a modern platform, cleaner architecture, and a better user experience.
AI will not remove the hard parts of modernization. But it may make the discovery, analysis, documentation, and first-pass generation work more manageable.
We heard a version of this in the Traust booth throughout the week. People were talking about legacy platforms, Forms migration, Salesforce Experience Cloud, internal workflows, and long-standing applications that are becoming harder to maintain.
The common thread was a sense that the mountain might be climbable now. Not easy. Not automatic. But more realistic than it felt even a year ago.
3. APEX has earned a clear place in the enterprise application stack.
Another theme we heard in sessions and conversations was that APEX is being discussed more confidently as part of the enterprise stack.
Other sessions placed APEX in the broader low-code world alongside platforms like OutSystems, Mendix, Power Platform, and Salesforce. Likewise, Scott Spendolini’s “Extending SaaS Applications with Oracle AI APEX” looked at the familiar problem of SaaS applications that are configurable but still cannot support every business need.
At the booth, that showed up in a simple way: people wanted to talk about where APEX fits. They were interested in support, modernization, UX, staffing, and how to make APEX part of a more intentional application strategy.
That includes UX: as more enterprises use APEX for serious internal and customer-facing applications, there is growing interest in making those applications feel more intentional, more polished, and better aligned to the way people actually work.
The conversation was less about proving APEX can do serious work and more about how teams should use it well.
4. APEX development is more disciplined and team-ready than ever before.
A lot of Kscope26 content was about the work around the app: naming, standards, version control, deployment, reusable components, security, and maintainability.
APEXlang was part of that story, especially in the sessions from Martin D’Souza, Neil Fernandez, and Scott Spendolini. But the theme showed up elsewhere too. Moritz Klein’s “Creating APEX Plugins — A Starter” focused on turning custom functionality into reusable components. The Lightning Talks on Thursday included topics like Deep Data Security from Karen Cannell, running APEX in multicloud from Vladislav Uvarov, and our own “Dynamic Form Rows” talk from Brock Ray and Angel Flores Torres.
Those topics are not as flashy as AI demos, but they are the things that make APEX sustainable for teams.
It is one thing to build a useful app quickly. It is another thing to build apps that multiple developers can understand, extend, test, deploy, secure, and support over time.
5. The bar for APEX application quality keeps rising.
Application quality means more than whether the app works.
It includes standards, security, testing, performance, maintainability, deployment practices, reusable patterns, and front-end quality. It also includes UX and UI design, which was especially fun for us this year because Traust’s Director of User Experience, Brock Ray, presented two sessions on the topic: “Death to Default: Simple Ways to Make APEX Apps Look Intentional” and “Beyond Theme Roller: Building a CSS Architecture for APEX.”
The response to those sessions was one of our favorite parts of the week. Several attendees said they had never really understood the design theory behind the kinds of UI improvements they wanted to make. Ideas like contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity gave people a more practical language for improving their next APEX development project.
Philipp Hartenfeller’s “JavaScript 101 for APEX Devs” fit into this same broader theme by helping PL/SQL-comfortable developers get more confident with front-end behavior, browser DevTools, APEX APIs, debugging, and asynchronous code.
Kevin Thyssen and Vito Van Hecke’s “Going live: Real-time magic in APEX” added another layer to that conversation, showing how Server-Sent Events, WebSockets, and WebRTC can support live-updating dashboards, messaging, and other real-time interactions in APEX. That kind of functionality is part of the same broader expectation: applications should not only look more polished but behave more like the modern tools users already know.
The larger point is simple: APEX developers are being asked to build better applications. Not just functional, low-code applets, but durable, usable, secure, maintainable applications that people can rely on — for both internal and customer-facing applications.
A strong week for the APEX community
Of course, Kscope is not only about the sessions.
The Traust booth gave us a chance to talk with a lot of people, and our developer personality quiz gave us an easy excuse to have some fun. One result felt especially appropriate: among everyone who took our AI personality quiz, not a single person landed on “AI Skeptic.” Given the audience, that was probably not surprising. But it did capture the mood. People are curious, engaged, and ready to experiment.
We were also proud to see our own Brock Ray speak at Kscope for the first time, and grateful for the way longtime Kscope attendees supported him throughout the week. That generosity is a real part of what makes the event work.
Kscope26 was a reminder that the APEX community is in a very good place. The volunteers, ODTUG board, speakers, sponsors, and attendees put a tremendous amount of care into the week. The result is an event that feels useful, welcoming, and genuinely loved.
We left Denver with new ideas, stronger connections, and a long list of things to keep exploring.
See you all next year in Nashville!
