Welcome to the February Newsletter! This
month... our continuous integration server was officially released, WikiPatterns.com is introduced, tech tips on
JIRA and Confluence,
news plugins and much more. Happy reading!
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How did you get everyone in your community
(department, company or broader community) to use a wiki? Or, perhaps you're still struggling
with ways to get people to use the wiki? The biggest challenge people face after first deciding to
use a wiki is getting all of their colleagues to use it too. Some organisations have been extremely
effective at getting mass participation on their wikis, others less so.
We've been
working hard on a brand new wiki-related project, and I'd like to
invite you to participate. Wikipatterns.com
is intended to give anyone anywhere, who is using any wiki software, a list of strategies for
successfully introducing a wiki to their organisation.
Continue
reading...
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We're really excited to let you know that Bamboo
1.0, our server software that automates the process of continuously building, integrating and
testing software code, has officially been released.
By automating the software build process and providing instant notifications of any problems in the
software's code, Bamboo helps development teams reduce project risk, improve productivity and
enhance software quality.
We put our own twist on continuous
integration by building into Bamboo build
telemetry — Bamboo gives you heaps of metrics
about your builds to help you see the big picture.
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Internally we have started migrating most of our applications to use Crowd as a
central location for authentication and authorisation information along with single sign-on (SSO).
One of the applications that had been escaping us was getting Subversion
integrated — but this has all changed.
We are happy to
say that Crowd can now be integrated with Apache
and Subversion.
The authentication handler works with the mod_perl
library that is commonly available for most Apache HTTP Server
installations. The security calls are then dispatched over SOAP using
SOAP::Lite for Perl. Continue
reading...
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 The latest on our plugins:
- WebDAV in Confluence:We've always thought that one of
the best
uses for Confluence is to replace the cluttered, disorganised Shared Drive that every team
has lurking around. Thanks to a new plugin, Confluence can now function as a full WebDAV
server. The plugin represents each Confluence space as a hierarchy of directories, just like
the operating system does. Download
this free plugin or continue
reading...
- New
Plugin Library Homepages: With as many plugins as we have these days, the plugin
libraries were starting to get a little out of hand. As a result I decided to simplify
things and highlight some of our most valuable plugins. Continue
reading...
- Recommended Upgrade to the Plugin Repository Client:
Just a quick note to let everyone know that we've released a small upgrade (1.3.1) to
the Plugin
Repository Client. The new version recognises the Atlassian-bundled plugins and does not
attempt to uninstall them. We recommend this upgrade for everyone using the plugin
repository. Continue
reading...
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JIRA time-tracking gets pretty:
What does '1.55d' mean to
you and your project managers? Perhaps you would prefer an issue's
'Time Spent' to look like this: 1 day, 12 hours, 30 minutes.
A new option in JIRA
3.7 lets administrators specify a Time Format of 'pretty'. Simply select (and for those of
us who don't work a 24-hour day, you can also specify the appropriate number of Hours-per-Day
and Days-per-Week).
Automatic anchors for Confluence headings:
Did you know that Confluence
automatically treats headings as anchors?
This means you can link straight to a heading, with no need to create an HTML anchor. Just type
this: [SPACE:#Text of heading], where SPACE is the space key.
To link to a heading on another page, type this: [SPACE:Some other page#Text of heading]
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In case you haven't heard, the U.S. Daylight Savings Time schedule has been
changed this year. This may cause
problems with Java applications (such as JIRA and Confluence) that rely on dates and times. In other
words, these applications may be 1 hour off the real time for certain periods in March and November.
Continue
reading...
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The JIRA
team has been doing some work to support Crowd
integration. In doing so, we needed
to get some of a user's details from Crowd (name, email address) and some from JIRA. The challenge is that JIRA uses a numeric ID
to access properties while Crowd just gives us a user name. In other words, we needed to map the
user name to an ID.
The first time that JIRA becomes aware of a new Crowd user, we need to create a new ID<->Name
mapping entry in the database.
However, it is quite possible, even quite likely in some circumstances, that JIRA could become
aware of a new user in more than one threat concurrently. If this happens, we could simply try
and insert them both (or all) into the database and wait for duplicate key exceptions; but these
exceptions aren't all that easy to decode across all the databases we support — and
besides, it feels dirty. Continue
reading...
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Read what our developers are blogging about
on the more technical front:
Using XMLTask for Maven and Ant for Crowd: I just thought I should share
this great little gem I stumbled across last week when I was faced with this Crowd
Issue. After a few quick searches on Google I came across this great little Ant library,
XMLTask.
After downloading the jar and having a
quick read of the great example docs, I had resolved my issue in 5 minutes! Continue
reading...
- Code Signing the JIRA installer:So we started work on the
JIRA installer for Windows this week. Amongst the heap of tasks
involved in this activity, there was one little task labeled 'Get code-signing
certificate to stop windows
warning about security of unknown publisher' with an estimate of 1h. A little ambitious
I thought at first. Then again we already have a Java applet that's been code-signed, so
it should just be a matter of taking its certificate and applying it to the installer exe,
right? Continue
reading...
- Javablogs — my first 6 weeks: As soon as I got my head around
the dev environment I spent a day or two browsing through the Javablogs code. What surprised
me the most was the immense use of libraries: webwork, hibernate, spring, os_user, seraph,
bucket, etc. I knew prior to joining that Atlassian was a pro-opensource company, I didn't
think it'd be like this. Continue
reading...
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 JIRA 3.7.4 was released last week, only a
couple weeks after its previous version. Read more about this release and download it today:
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Blogs and sites that we're sharing around the office:
- Wondering
how technology can help the environment? Read Wired's article "The
Green Revolution" written by Alex Nikolai Steffen.
- Although still awaiting official Guinness Book results, Canadians made a great attempt to
overtake Australia's fame of having the largest
pub crawl yet. 3,200 people in 26 bars, not bad.
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What did you think of this newsletter? Would you share it with a friend or do you have
any recommendations? Let
us know.
Cheers!
Your mates at Atlassian
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