Archives for Don Brown

AtlasCamp Video – Plugins Present and Future

I've been heads down the last six months or so before AtlasCamp, working on the next generation of the Atlassian Plugins framework used by all our products, and at the conference, I had a chance to come up for air and share what we've been working on. These videos cover the current state of Atlassian Plugins 2, and where we want to go in the future, respectively. AtlasCamp was great because the information truly flowed in both directions, as you'll see in the second video, when the attendees broke

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Developing JIRA Studio – Finding Common Ground

Plugins are arguably the killer feature for Atlassian products, as they allow you to tweak a theme or deploy full-blown applications within a familiar environment and infrastructure. The number of plugins available, especially for established products like Confluence and JIRA, is huge and the amount of extension points available to plugins basically give you full control of the host application. That much power comes with a price - your plugin is heavily tied to the product, and anyone who has done

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Developing JIRA Studio Part 1

For the last few months, we've been hard at work creating the newest member of the Atlassian family, JIRA Studio. Since this product is targeted squarely at developers, we decided it would be useful to engage the developer community to talk about what we are working on, both the good and the bad. Our team uses a modified XP process that splits work into one or two week iterations, recording tasks using both JIRA and the more traditional note cards. In this last iteration, numbered 114, our

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FedEx VI – One-Click Blog Publishing

An important lesson in software is to use it for what it does well, and don't try to force it into areas it isn't meant for. Blogging has become an important communication tool for many companies, both outside and inside the firewall. Confluence provides decent support for blogging, and a good match for behind-the-firewall internal blogs that need connectivity to core business systems rather than optimised public access. On the other hand, Confluence isn't as well suited to be a public blog, particularly

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OSGi Plugin for Struts 2: Lessons from Confluence

Confluence and JIRA have a great plugin system at their core that allows you to install collections of actions, Spring beans (Confluence), jobs, etc. as discrete plugins. Confluence supports hot-deploying these plugins so they can be added, removed, or upgraded without bringing down the application. This capability is so powerful that internally we are moving more and more functionality into plugins as a way to organise our codebase and keep it tightly-focused and agile. Wanting this same functionality

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Remote Log Monitoring via RSS

While its great that applications such as Confluence keep track of errors by writing them to the logs, they are generally ignored as there is no convenient way to access them. I set out to solve this problem by writing a script (built on Enchanter) that processes log files on a remote server for any error messages, then creates an RSS feed. Here are a couple feeds I created for some servers I was interested in: The base Enchanter script that generates these feeds is log4j-rss.bsh. The script generates

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