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The big news this month is our annual plugin contest, Codegeist. All submissions are due by May 13th. Additional highlights include a wiki case study with a biotechnology company, as well as other goodies including our reading list. Happy reading!
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It's that time of the year again! Atlassian has kicked-off Codegeist II, our second annual plugin competition. Prize money has doubled since last year's competition — US $20,000 will be given away along with bunches of software licenses. And, of course, all entrants will receive a Codegeist t-shirt.
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When Crowd first became an Atlassian product, its code lived in CVS and was built using a bunch of Ant scripts. This is quite common for a lot of projects out there, but it is something that can be improved on. Over the last 6 months the Crowd team has taken a phased approach to moving Crowd into the world of Continuous Integration. Basically we have taken the following steps:
See how this panned out — continue reading...
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A few months ago we interviewed Mingyi Liu of GPC Biotech about how they're using Confluence to record, share, and review preliminary experimental results. Here's a question from the case study:
Read the full GPC Biotech case study here. Catch up on all the Confluence case studies.
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"Let mortal combat begin" The JIRA 1.5 JVM (and more recently 1.6 as well) functional tests started running out of memory last week. To address this, the first step was to get all our builds to dump out the heap if they run out of memory. This was achieved by adding the following flags:
-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -XX:HeapDumpPath=/home/j2ee/heapdumps One thing to note is that this functionality was added to Java 1.6, but it has been backported to JDK 1.5_07 and JDK 1.4_12 (I think). It wont work with earlier versions of 1.5 and 1.4, or non-Sun JVMs. An initial investigation of the heap dumps with YourKit showed that about 138MB of the 256MB allocated were used up by the JspRuntimeContext. Tomcat bug? Possible, so I fired off an e-mail to the tomcat-users list.
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I got a call today from a customer who asked how he can get additional statistics from Confluence. He wanted to know if there is a plugin that gives data on most popular wiki pages, most active users, what pages do new users visit first, etc.? Two thoughts here: First, the new Activity Tracking Plugin shipped with Confluence 2.3, which extended the reporting capabilities built into Confluence. Statistics for use of each space can be found through the 'Activity' tab. Second, you can use your website analytics software to get even greater depth. We use Omniture SiteCatalyst on our website and on other sites that we manage, including one of our wiki-based extranets.
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A couple tips about building with Bamboo: 1. Manage with dependencies At Atlassian, we use Bamboo extensively as our continuous integration platform across all our products. In JIRA, for example, we have an array of build plans set up: builds for running unit tests on Enterprise JDK 1.4, unit tests on Enterprise JDK 1.5, functional tests on Enterprise JDK 1.6, etc. Typically a code change will trigger the whole avalanche of builds. This doesn't particularly make sense when things fail though, especially if the failure is, say, a compile error. We don't need all the JIRA builds to run to tell us that the commit have caused a basic compilation error. Using build dependencies, we can manage this a lot better by specifying a "gate-keeper" build plan. On the commit of code, only the gate-keeper plan will be triggered. Only on the success of this gate-keeper build will subsequent JIRA builds run. 2. Doing things your way with Bamboo plugins Ever thought that it would be really cool if Bamboo could do such and such after a build? By writing a Bamboo post-build plugin, it will. Some example post build plugins we have include the Clover analysis tool, and a scp artifacts publisher. You can find more information about Bamboo's plugin framework in general here. Write a Bamboo plugin now, and you can also submit it to Codegeist II, our second annual plugin competition. This year, we are giving away $20k in cash prizes!
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We just launched a new design for Wikipatterns, so have a look. Now it is much less technical looking, and I'm hoping this makes it more inviting for non-technical users. For those who haven't heard, Wikipatterns is an Atlassian-sponsored, unbiased community resource where you can read or join in the conversation on ways to spur wiki adoption within organisations. P.S. The new Wikipatterns design is not a completely different site — it is Confluence in disguise. Can you tell?
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Here are a few sites and blogs we've been sharing around the office, thanks to del.icio.us tagging:
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As we mentioned last month, we have just switched email delivery services in the hope that you'll get our newsletter every month. To help ensure proper delivery, however, it'd be best if you added our email address (newsletter-owner@atlassian.com) to your safe list or address book. Cheers!
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