2010/06/10
Here's a quick round-up of the key announcements from this year's Atlassain Summit 2010 keynote...
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Universal Plugin Mgr - Plugin Exchange
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Keynote presentation
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All seats filled :)
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Universal Plugin Mgr - Audit Log
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Greenhopper 5
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JIRA Wallboards
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Universal Plugin Manager
Several years ago Adaptavist wrote a little plugin that revolutionised how plugins were managed in Confluence - the Plugin Repository. It won first prize at Atlassian's first ever Codegeist contest and subsequently became a standard feature of Confluence.
At Summit 2009, Atlassian announced the Plugin Exchange - the next evolutionary step of the Plugin Repository which provided a website where customers could find, download and review plugins.
This year, the next step in the evolution was announced - the Universal Plugin Manager, which will appear in all Atlassian products. So what's so great about that?
First, there's a complete UI overhaul that makes it easier for system admins to get stuff done - fast!
Second, and perhaps more important, there's a full audit trail - now you can see who installed/upgraded/disabled a plugin, etc., and when.
This is incredibly useful when it comes to supporting the application because if something suddenly breaks you can now quickly refer to the audit trail to determine whether it's plugin related.
Auto-suggest in Rich Text editor
If you're familiar with wiki markup, you can now start typing it in to the Rich Text Editor and get auto-suggest completion of things like macro tags, etc.
Why would you want this...?
Wiki Markup to be replaced by XHTML
Yes, you read correctly. Confluence's wiki markup will be replaced with XHTML in Confluence 4.0 which is due in about 6 months.
XHTML allows much more control over content formatting - such as cell merging in tables, which is one of the most widely requested features. It will effectively turn Confluecne in to a state of the art CMS, as well as being a wiki.
Warning: We're expecting lots of plugins and macros will need refactoring so don't expect to upgrade as soon as Confluence 4 is released. Test everything heavily in a development environment first!
Atlassian User Task Force
The User Task Force is an opt-in initiative allowing customers and end-users to provide much more direct feedback to Atlassian. For more information see the Atlassian Task Force opt-in form.
JIRA Wallboards
JIRA will be getting a feature called 'Wallboards' - these are essentially dashboards that have different styling that's ideal for display on a wall mounted information screen.
For more information see the JIRA Wallboard Plugin.
JIRA productivity enhancements
JIRA is also getting an overhaul that will greatly boost productivity. For example, there are some tasks that would usually require you to wade through 12 screens - that task can now be done from 1 screen. For heavy users of JIRA this will save vast amounts of time.
Greenhopper UI overhaul
Greenhopper 5 (released today) will also be getting a UI overhaul.
More info in the Greenhopper 5 release notes.
There are now over 10,000 customers (compared to just 900 last year).
Launch Pad
Immediately after the Keynote the Launch Pad started and Adaptavist were first to present, announcing the Visual VM (real-time Confluence health monitor) plugin....
You can find out about the other Launch Pad presentations here.
Got questions on how these changes will affect you? Contact Us
As the first presentation in Atlassian Summit Launch Pad, Keith Brophy announced our latest plugin - Visual VM.
Java Application Surgery
Developers and administrators of Java applications should be very familiar with the Java VisualVM tool. This tool allows access to important information related to a Java process:
Java VisualVM is a tool that provides a visual interface for viewing detailed information about Java applications while they are running on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and for troubleshooting and profiling these applications.
Java VisualVM federates tools such as JConsole, jstat, jinfo, jstack, and jmap to obtain data from the JVM software, then re-organizes and presents the information graphically, to enable you to view different data about multiple Java applications uniformly, whether they are running locally or on remote machines.
This tool is an invaluable resource when monitoring or diagnosing (and resolving) a number of situations and scenarios:
- generating and analysing heap dumps
- tracking down memory leaks
- performing and monitoring garbage collection
- performing lightweight memory and CPU profiling.
Integrate It
Our development/support team have used the VisualVM tool to address a number of issues with various Confluence installations. The team decided to make the next logical step of integrating the power of VisualVM directly within Confluence.
Such integration would avoid any of the complexities of configuring the application externally and allow for direct access of vital system data from within the application itself. The flexibility of Confluence's plugin system and the extensible nature of the VisualVM code gave rise to the Adaptavist VisualVM Plugin.
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Visual VM screenshot
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Keith Brophy announcing Visual VM plugin
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Keith on stage
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Health monitor
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Who Watches the Monitors
The main screen of the plugin provides graph or numerical details for:
- CPU usage
- Memory
- Classes
- Threads
We unleashed our UI experts on this plugin and we think they have done a pretty good job. It is possible to select a section of the any of the graphed data and zoom in for a more detailed view of the information recorded. The zoomed view is synchronised across all four graphing panels. Hovering over certain points in the graph provides further information for that point in the collected data.
The polling time for the plugin can also be configured to record information at differnt granularity levels.
Threads and Garbage
The Threads tab presents details of the threads currently running within the JVM serving up Confluence. This information is invaluable when diagnosing deadlock issues. The Garbage Collection tab provides further details relating to the memory usage for the JVM. It is also possible to suggest a GC from this tab panel.
Snapshots
The plugin also allows for the capture of a snapshot of the information recorded. This means that the information can be reviewed on another instance - extremely useful in support cases.
Support Plugins
The VisualVM Plugin is exclusively available to all subscribers of our support service.
For those who couldn't attend, here's a recap of the Summit 2010 launch pad presentations where Atlassian partners got to show off their latest and greatest...
Note: Click any of the pics for a bigger version.
1. Adaptavist announce Visual VM plugin for Confluence
We announced our new Visual VM plugin that displays a real-time Confluence 'health monitor'.
Find out more about VisualVM health monitor plugin in our blog...
You can also find out more about Visual VM and a load of other new plugins we've released in our Newspaper.
2. AppFire announce Enterprise Sync
Matt and the AppFire team announced their Enterprise Sync and demoed it backing up data to a pen drive.
Adaptavist staff are still recovering from last nights' FireWater party that was hosted by AppFire!
3. Comalatech announce Ad-hoc Workflows Exchange for Confluence
Our good friend Roberto from ComalaTech announced the Workflows Exchange where users of the Ad-hoc Workflows plugin can share their workflows with other customers. Awesome!
Ad-hoc Workflows website | ComalaTech website
You can find out more about the Ad-hoc Workflows plugin in the Adaptavist Newspaper.
4. Contegix announce plans for European presence
Contegix are the company that hosts Atlassian's SaaS solutions such as Confluence Hosted and JIRA Studio. They've announced that they are planning to open a data centre in Europe within the next 12 months. They didn't say much else.
No pics yet, sorry.
5. Customware announce Salesforce Connector for Confluence
Our good friend Rob showed a Salesforce Connector which allows you to integrate Confluecne and Salesforce, even if your Confluence wiki is behind a firewall!
6. Gliffy announce Gliffy Flowcharts 3.0 for Confluence
Debi, Chris and the Gliffy team totally rocked their presentation dressed as pirates for the launch of Gliffy 3.0 flowcharting plugin for Confluence.
7. New Relic announce RPM monitoring tool
New Relic demoed their RPM tool which is a SaaS (software as a service) JVM monitoring tool. They've integrated it with JIRA so that tickets can be updated, etc.
No screen shots yet, sorry.
8. Kap IT announce Confluence FX Desktop client
Our good friends at KapIT announced the launch of their Confluence FX desktop client for Confluence. It's an Adobe AIR app (that runs on Windows and Mac computers) and allows you to monitor activity on Confluence and do searches direct from your desktop.
KapIT website - their website uses our Theme Builder pliugin, nice eh?
9. Near Infinity announce Mini Confluence plugin
Near Infinity had made an iPhone app for Confluence but now they've gone to the next level and created a Confluence plugin that provides mobile interfaces for all popular phones - it's really awesome!
10. Perforce share their Agile insights
Stephanie Turner from Perforce talked about features to allow mining data from your revision control system to help prepare for retrospectives and plan for future sprints.
11. StepStone announce Zen Foundation theme for Confluence
StepStone have announced their Zen Foundation plugin for Confluence. It's a theme plugin that allows you to customise how Confluence looks.
12. TaskDock announce latest version of TaskDock plugin for Confluence & JIRA
Our friend Erik presented the latest version of TaskDock plugin which allows you to create tasks within Confluence (eg. "Joe: update this page") and also synchronise them with JIRA tickets, which is pretty awesome!
You can find out more about TaskDock in the Adaptavist Newspaper.
13. TM Software announce new release of Tempo Plugin for JIRA
TM Software announced the latest release of their Tempo plugin for JIRA - it allows you to do things like time sheets and other reporting directly from within JIRA. The latest release looks really nice!
And the prize for best presenter goes to...
Gliffy of course! Their pirates routine stole the show - great work Chris, Debi and the Gliffy team!!
This is why they won: Video of Gliffy's presentation.
You can find a case study and more information on Gliffy 3.0 in the Adaptavist Newspaper!
