It’s been another exciting three months for Atlassian’s Forge platform. On August 23rd, we gathered together again for our quarterly webinar discussing our progress on the Forge Roadmap. We welcomed product managers from a diverse range of teams to share updates about recently shipped and upcoming features, and then took some time to answer a few questions from the community.
If you missed it, the entire recording is available on our Atlassian Developer YouTube Channel. Or, keep scrolling and get a quick recap of the highlights, including improvements to Forge hosted storage, new Confluence modules, and logging, alerting, and monitoring updates that will help improve the developer experience.
Let’s see how far we’ve come
There’s nothing more exciting for the Forge team than a shipped feature. Since our webinar in Q1 2022, we’ve delivered 9 Forge Jira modules and have made progress on four more. Let’s dive deeper into a few of the specific updates
New Forge modules for Jira
| Shipped | In Progress | Upcoming |
| Jira Entity Properties Dashboards Jira subPages Custom fields improvements UI modifications preview Modals Refresh issue view Links events Projects and global permissions | Dashboards and issue background scripts Configure & Get Started pages Custom Fields inline edit UI modifications GA | JQL Functions Display conditions Custom field improvements UI modifications and additional views |
Adding new Forge modules to empower Marketplace Partners to think bigger is a top priority. During Q1, we planned to release 7 new Forge modules in Q3. Today, we’re at 9 new modules, including:
- Jira Entity Properties
- Dashboards
- Jira subPages
- Custom fields improvements
- UI modifications
- Modals
- Refresh issue view
- Links events
- Project and global permissions
There are even more improvements coming in September and later this year, including UI modifications GA, building interactive apps using background scripts, and Configure and Get Started page improvements to help improve your app’s installation experience.
Increased customization with workflow extensibility
| Shipped | In Progress | Upcoming |
| Validators Validators with UI Conditions | Conditions with UI | Post functions Post functions with UI |
Workflow modules enable apps to modify workflow transitions in Jira. We’ve added several new functionalities to the expression validators, and you can now define a custom UI for creating, editing, or viewing validator configurations, and save configurations to the config variable.
Complex queries for the Forge storage API
| Shipped | In Progress | Upcoming |
| N/A | Complex queries using custom entities (Oct-Nov Release) | N/A |
As we discussed during Developer Day, we have several important improvements currently in progress for the Forge storage API. Soon, developers will be able to get support for new ways of structuring data and indexes, query-by-value, and additional filters.
Improving Forge hosted storage is important to us, and we’re targeting a release of October-November 2022 for this new feature. Our Early Access Program (EAP) release will let you define up to 5 custom entities per app environment, or 15 entities per environment – future iterations will have higher limits.
For more information or to provide us with valuable feedback on Forge complex queries, take a look at our recent post in the Developer Community.
Building the most extensible cloud with Bitbucket Cloud
| Shipped | In Progress | Upcoming |
| N/A | Forge in Bitbucket Cloud EAP Oct 2022-Mar 2023 | Expansion of Marketplace & Monetization tooling (late 2023) |
During the webinar, we provided an update on extending Bitbucket Cloud using Forge. We’re currently targeting October 2022-March 2023 for an EAP. In late 2023, we’re planning to expand the Marketplace and monetization tooling for Bitbucket.
Achieving Custom UI Bridge parity
| Shipped | In Progress | Upcoming |
| Custom UI Bridge | N/A | N/A |
One big accomplishment this quarter was a popular ask from our community: reaching feature parity with Connect for the Custom UI bridge. This JavaScript API for Custom UI apps enables interactions with the host product, APIs, and the user’s browser. Recent updates include improvements to the modal, flags for alerts, and the ability to refresh data with the Events API.
It’s available now, so take a look and let us know what you think!
Launching new Confluence modules
| Shipped | In Progress | Upcoming |
| Macro exports Get Started page Configure page Custom Content | N/A | N/A |
We discussed a few updates to Confluence modules, including macro exports, the custom content module from Connect, and new Getting Started and Configure modules to help create a great customer experience.
Soon, we’ll be launching inline macros for Confluence – so stay tuned!
An update on the OAuth Scopes project
The OAuth scopes project was created to provide app data transparency to customers. After rolling out granular scopes in February, we pulled back and reevaluated.
In the interim, we are maintaining both sets of scopes, with classic scopes featured more prominently in the developer console. Granular scopes are also subject to a limit of 50. We’re thinking about the most ideal way forward, which will involve defining a new scope set. To do that, we’re assessing and interviewing partners, customers, and internal stakeholders. Once we’ve come up with a new approach, we’ll be doing concept testing to make sure the next rollout is a solution that works for everyone.
Improving app monitoring: logs, errors and alerting
| Shipped | In Progress | Upcoming |
| Access to Forge logs Alerting for Forge apps Error drill down | N/A | Deployment events (Q2, FY23) Logs UX improvements |
Instead of having to ask customers to share logs with you, all new Forge app installations will automatically be opted in to share logs, and users can opt out if they choose. This will help Marketplace Partners more easily troubleshoot issues.
We also updated our alerting capabilities to let app owners know when their app’s invocation success rate drops to 99% or below for longer than 5 minutes. This keeps developers from constantly having to check their metrics, while giving them a heads up so they can resolve issues before customers notice. We also added an error drill down chart to help developers easily identify sites that are contributing to the low invocation rate.
Next, we plan to ship an overlay of deployment events and UI improvements for logs.
Introducing the Developer Support Portal
We’ve created a new developer and marketplace support page that lets you get help for many different types of queries in one central spot. At the same time, we’ve increased the size of our support team to decrease response times.
Check out https://developer.atlassian.com/support to try it out!
Q&A
At the end of the webinar, we opened up the floor for the audience to ask questions. Here’s a quick summary of a few of the highlights.
Will the improvements being talked about for Forge hosted storage improve the speed that it takes to query and return data?
We are continually monitoring performance of querying capabilities and adjusting our plans accordingly to continue improving the performance as required. We had increased API operations limit earlier in the year, and more recently in June based on feedback from developers. We will continue to observe feedback and improve performance of API capabilities in future.
Will there be UI Kit support for workflow modules anytime soon?
We have been focusing at first to unblock building Forge apps around workflows area. UI Kit support for workflow modules is on our longer term roadmap as we are gathering your feedback and interest.
When will Forge support teams developing apps allowing for multiple owners of an app?
Multi user app ownership is one of our top priorities for 2023. We’re targeting late 2022 or the first half of 2023.
When will it be possible to have Forge react to events? For example, a custom-built Forge field or value (like “Priority”) reacting to updates made to other fields in the Create Issue screen.
This scenario is a great use case for UI modifications in the Issue view, which will reach GA in the near future (see “New Forge modules = Bigger, better apps” above). It also links into some Spikes we’re currently undertaking around app refreshing, interactivity, and background scripts.
What is Atlassian doing to assist and support general response time?
We are spending a lot of time on our support structure. This includes making our content top notch, so you can find answers fast. We have a strong focus on reliability and support for this year, which also means extending our development experience team to improve response times.
Can Compass apps be sold on the Marketplace?
Not at the moment, because the Compass team has to integrate with the Atlassian Marketplace. It’s on the roadmap for the future.
Is it possible to change the email for Forge alerts, or add more email addresses?
Alerts will be sent to the app owner’s email and app owners will not be able to add a different email. However we are considering adding this as a feature in future iterations.
Until next time
Thanks again to everyone who joined us live for the webinar and asked such great questions. We’ll see you in Q4 for another Forge Roadmap update!
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.