Welcome to the first Atlassian newsletter of 2007! This month...
Confluence Massive released, two new Confluence case
studies, technical insights from our developers and much more. Happy reading!
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 Confluence
2.3: bigger, better, and ready for download. This latest edition offers users an optional clustered
configuration, Confluence Massive. With unlimited scalability,
together with exceptional performance and reliability, Massive is perfect for large deployments of the wiki.
In addition, Confluence 2.3 contains dozens
of other new features and improvements, including a People Directory, which allows users to easily find
other Confluence users' profiles and personal spaces; an
activity-tracking plugin that generates statistics on application usage; and a WebDAV client
plugin.
Get more information:
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With a recent release of our single sign-on solution, Crowd, our team
decided to upgrade the WebWork 1.4 stack
to version 2.2.4, which, as of now, is the most recent
release. When we originally sat down to write Crowd (previously IDX), we evaluated a variety of technologies
and ended up picking version 1.4 because of the stability
offered by the framework having a known list of limitations and bugs. Now that version 2.x has been out for
quite some time, we are able to take advantage of lessons
learned from a variety of people who have already embarked on this challenge.
The first concern that we had is that all of JSP tag syntax would blow up.
This turned out not to be as bad as expected, but did require every page to be updated in some capacity.
Some of the value stack objects did not work out-of-the-box
and tag libraries syntax was fully backwards compatible. Once we identified the core challenges in
upgrading pages, one of our developers spearheaded the task…
after the first few pages he was able to move pretty quickly and was typing faster than I could follow
when we did an analysis of a page update.
Continue
reading...
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 Here's an
assortment of blogs introducing a few new plugins:
- Confluence
snippet plugin: Tired of keeping your source code comments or code snippets in sync
with your documentation? Introducing the Snippet
Plugin 2.0, which allows you to include text snippets from external
URLs such as Subversion or ViewCVS in your Confluence pages. The plugin supports the ability to
define lists of accepted url prefixes to protect against abuse.
Snippet URL's aren't limited to plain or HTML text...
- Job manager
plugin: This
plugin displays the current jobs scheduled by Confluence and any plugins,
as well as allowing you to run, pause, or resume execution of these jobs with a click of the
mouse...
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Read what our developers are blogging about on the more technical front:
- How to use
file separator when loading resources: The answer is
"Don't use it!" Now, why would I say that you shouldn't use file separator when
loading resources? The reason is that a file and a resource are not
the same. In most cases, a resource will be a file on the disk and, even if you use file separator,
you would not have any problems loading it. (Java is
smart.)...
- Taming
wild classpaths: One of
the more frustrating things to diagnose when supporting our products are classpath issues. You know
the ones. Finding out where a particular web container is sourcing
its jars from can be a nightmare in itself. Help is now here. Hopefully this will significantly
reduce the turnaround time in diagnosing these types of problems in
Confluence 2.3 and beyond...
- The
value of software
self-tests: What was so great about this experience that made me write this blog post?
It was the sheer fact that all I had to do was to ask the customer
to run the integrity checker, it not only finds possible problems with data but also offers
a “Fix” button to correct any found
inconsistencies...
Visit our Developer
Blog for more entries.
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At Atlassian we believe in eating our own
dogfood. We've
therefore setup Bamboo to
continuously build and integrate our own products.
In fact, we've got an entire box dedicated to running all the JIRA automated tests on a number of
different JDKs and app servers. Some of the stats from this new
box were pretty amazing and worth sharing here.
On our old build box all we could really afford was to run one functional test build of JIRA for the
Enterprise
edition. This build usually took around 70-100 mins to complete. Pretty slow really. On the new box, all
functional tests run in about 20 mins. It's a pretty late
model quad core Xeon and even with 3-4 functional builds running in parallel, the build times didn't
increase much more than 1-2 minutes for each build. Pretty
impressive. All of JIRA compiles in about 10-15 seconds. The Unit tests take about a minute to run in
total. Continue reading...
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 Did you know
the Constitution Day
site is actually Confluence in disguise? We've
blogged about it before, but now we have a couple case studies highlighting interesting and different
aspects:
- National
Constitution Center case study: Focusing on the Constitution Day wiki,
this case study reveals how the National Constitution Center prepared the site, which received
50,000 hits per day at its peak. Today this wiki continues to be a
resource where people can upload, publish, share and access knowledge...
- Night Kitchen
case study: This case study spotlights a small design firm and
Atlassian partner that builds stellar websites by redesigning Confluence with Adaptivist's
Builder plugin. Learn some of their thinking on and practices with
building websites on Confluence...
While you're in the neighborhood, catch up on our growing library of wiki case studies.
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 Linden Lab, makers of the
virtual reality game Second Life,
called us late last week to tell us they wanted to use JIRA
as their community issue tracker for their new
open source 'Viewer'
project. We were thrilled to hear it.
While most JIRA customers use the application for bug tracking, many, including
Linden Lab, use JIRA to
manage other business-related tasks. For over a year, Linden Lab has leveraged JIRA internally as a collaboration and knowledge sharing tool
between employees, making it perhaps the most interesting use case of JIRA that
we've come across.
See our case study to
learn how Linden Lab uses JIRA across their company. Read more
about how Linden Lab is using JIRA for the 'Viewer' project in this press release.
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Here are a few of the blogs and
sites we've been sharing around the office:
- Ready for a challenge? How about the Java 4K
Programming Contest, in which you can use only 4096 bytes to create an
entire game. Good luck!
- Another thing to conquer: the Python
Challenge, self-dubbed as "the first programming riddle on the net."
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Thanks for reading our January issue!
Did you find something in the newsletter worth
sharing with
colleagues? Forward the email along, or tell them to subscribe. Also,
please
let us know what you liked and what you'd like to see in future issues. Don't be shy—we always love
hearing from you.wsletter/
Until next month,
Your mates at Atlassian
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