We are discontinuing the support for Atlassian IDE Connectors

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Four years in software industry is like two lifespans in human years. The evolution of Atlassian products is so fast that looking back at the product releases from four years ago is like watching the black and white photos of our grand parents when they were young.

Four years ago Jens Schumacher, the Group Product Manager of Development Tools at Atlassian, wrote a blog post where he explained our motivation behind starting the open source Atlassian IDE Connector project. We had a goal of delivering a faster and more convenient way to interact with Atlassian applications.

Since we started that effort, a lot has changed. The web and our products have evolved, and as a consequence, IDE Connectors are duplicating functionality that is already available today in Atlassian products.

Over the last several years, we have performed a full redesign of all Atlassian products’ UI to match the Atlassian Design Guidelines. We made the flows more consistent, and we have tied many of our products much closer together. At the same time we have invested a huge effort into product APIs, and have created a whole new add-on platform to support all those cases where we could not provide functionality within the products directly, or users desired integration with external systems.

There is still a lot of work ahead of us to make our products and respective platforms stronger. For that reason we have decided to end the support of IDE connectors. The product will remain available as open source, and we will continue to host it on Bitbucket.

What exactly is changing?

Atlassian will not release any new versions of IDE connectors, the current release is the last. We have also discontinued the customer support and Atlassian Answers effort related to IDE Connectors.

Specifically:

These changes are effective immediately.

What about the older versions of the Atlassian IDE Connectors?

You will still be able to download these versions of the Connectors, but Atlassian will not maintain support for them going forward. The good news is that Atlassian IDE Connectors are open source, and we have just made it a whole lot easier for you to contribute by hosting the Atlassian IDE Connectors on BitBucket. Please feel free to fork  the VisualStudioEclipse or IDEA repository and contribute to the project.

We are also making the documentation for the connectors open source. You can access them here: http://atlassian-docs.bitbucket.org/

What if I have questions?

Please feel free to get in touch with us. You can email me directly under: bgatz at atlassian dot com.