During our quarterly Forge roadmap for Q1, the Ecosystem Platform team shared progress on recently shipped features and updates on what to expect for the year ahead following shifts in roadmap priorities.
Highlights from this conversation include progress on Forge for Bitbucket and complex queries and custom entities, a look inside upcoming improvements to the Forge runtime, allowing unlicensed user access to Forge apps on the JSM portal, and Jira extensibility updates. Read more to learn what else we’re looking forward to for this year.
Addressing recent changes to developer platform priorities
The past months have been a dynamic period in Atlassian’s history. We reorganized our company in response to the changing and difficult macroeconomic environment and made tough calls to prioritize the most critical work.
As a result, several Ecosystem Platform initiatives will be paused, including Forge Mobile and Granular OAuth 2.0 scopes. We will continue to invest in ongoing short term roadmap commitments, including the new Forge runtime, multi-user app ownership, client-side UI kit, and app data access control. We are also continuing to work toward roadmap commitments that sit slightly farther out, including Forge data residency and Connect-on-Forge.
Forge roadmap updates: What’s next
With these broader changes addressed, Forge product managers dove into individual updates across Forge. Here are a few of the highlights.
Forge for Bitbucket
Bitbucket Cloud’s rising popularity among customers presents an exciting extensibility opportunity for partners. To date, Bitbucket Connect has been the method for building Bitbucket apps, but we’re excited to go all in on Forge, which will allow us to create a more standardized developer experience across our products. Here’s a summary of our progress so far:
Implementing Forge UI extensibility in some areas of Bitbucket Cloud is relatively complete, and we’ve finished work to enable Forge functions and Forge events. We’re also putting the final touches on the developer console to allow third parties to deploy and maintain apps. Our goal is to deliver a light-touch EAP with a focus on extending the pull request experience. After this initial EAP, we’ll hold a closed EAP with a small set of developers. Sign up via the enrollment form to get involved.
Shortly after, we plan to bring something new to our extensibility tool kit: custom merge checks for Bitbucket Cloud, built on top of Forge. Our research indicates the high value of this feature, and we plan to use it as the basis for a wider extensibility framework, which will extend checks all the way through the workflow.
There is one additional callout: today, Atlassian Marketplace does not support the sale of Bitbucket apps. However, future support for Bitbucket in Marketplace is on our radar, and standardizing on Forge will help make this possible.
Complex queries and custom entities
Many of our most-requested Forge features revolve around storage, and we’re excited to bring custom entities and complex queries into early access. The public opt-in EAP began in April, and you can express your interest here. Since we began work on this feature, there have been a few minor changes to the implementation, which you can find documented in the developer community.
Invocation time for Forge app observability
The invocation time metric helps developers understand the time it takes for each function to complete a successful invocation. You can now group invocation time by function and version to help you identify factors contributing to increases. This feature has been shipped and is available in EAP.
Multi-user app ownership
Multi-user app ownership allows users to add, list, and remove contributors to your app via the Forge CLI. Contributors can then create, deploy, and install on multiple development environments. This new feature enables collaboration for teams building Forge apps. If you’re interested in helping us test this feature, you can sign your team up for the EAP.
Here’s a roundup of features that are currently available, in-progress, and upcoming:
Improving the Forge Runtime
We are in closed EAP for a new feature that will run Forge apps on the standard Node.js runtime provided by AWS (instead of within a sandboxed VM). The new approach will improve performance, enable compatibility with standard libraries, and remove a major blocker for future multi-language support. Early access is expected mid-year, with a Preview release to follow later.
Unlicensed user access on the Jira Service Management customer portal
Unlicensed user access in the Jira Service Management portal is now available, enabling anonymous users, customer accounts, and unlicensed accounts to interact with Forge apps. See the changelog for more details.
User consent screen
Work is still underway to remove the need for all users to consent to Forge apps. Stay tuned for more updates on this much-requested feature – it’s planned to launch in June.
Client-side UI kit
Client-side UI kit adds performance and flexibility to the existing UI kit while making it compatible with Custom UI. After running a successful EAP with excellent feedback, we’re continuing to move forward with more improvements.
To date, we’ve added:
- A new client-side runtime for snappy interactivity
- More styling and layouts for increased flexibility
- A new frame component to render Custom UI components alongside UI kit components
UI modifications for Jira
A lot happened with Jira extensibility in Q1: two new features shipped, and five more are currently in the works.
The top highlights from Q1 were:
- General Availability (GA) for Forge Custom Fields, with 50 apps built and more than 5,000 installs
- UI modifications on Global Issue Create now support all major fields. Apps using this feature have become the fastest-growing group of Forge apps.
- EAP for JQL function extensibility, which will support the creation of apps to improve Jira users’ search experience
- Updates to Jira workflow extensibility through new modules that will enable apps to modify workflow transitions
Next, we’ll be working on implementing Forge custom fields background refresh and client-side UI kit custom fields.
Q&A
After sharing all updates, we gave participants the opportunity to ask questions.
Q: Can the Forge runtime EAP be used in production apps (think new apps for example)?
Currently, the EAP is not suitable for production. We’re working on getting it from Early Access to Preview later in 2023 so then we can give the green light for production usage.
Q: We’re going to release a new application and want to track user activities to find out which functions are used most. Is there any platform that could help us record user activities? Is there any plan to increase the feature set of Forge logs (such as pagination for logs)?
There’s no built-in support that provides behavioral analytics in Forge Apps. However, we have prioritized observability for performance and reliability. We recommend exploring third-party tools, like Segment.io, Clicktale, Google Analytics, or Amplitude. All these tools should be able to integrate on the front end and back end of a Forge app. We do have future plans to introduce pagination for logs, but not for the current short-term roadmap.
Q: Do you have any public GitHub/Bitbucket repos of example Forge applications?
Yes! There are example apps for Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and Compass in the Atlassian Developer documentation.
Q: The fact that Forge apps are not always deployed in the cloud region closest to the customer causes latency. Is Atlassian considering deploying Forge apps in all regions so they can stay as close as possible to the Jira instances of the customers?
Yes, this is within our scope of enabling support for Forge data residency. Today, all Forge apps are only deployed in the US West. If you’re in the EU, you can pay a double tax on performance. In the future, Forge apps and all underlying infrastructure will be replicated in multiple regions. This will improve performance and maintain the app’s innovation as close to the geographical location of the customer site as possible.
Until next time
Thank you to everyone who joined us live for the presentation, asked questions, and shared our excitement for what’s ahead in 2023. We look forward to sharing another round of Forge Roadmap updates with you next time.
Legal Disclaimer: This webinar contains forward-looking statements which involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Atlassian undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this presentation to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this presentation or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. The achievement or success of the matters covered by such forward-looking statements involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and assumptions.