Further to last month’s blog, we have an update on our plans to ship breaking changes across Server Products. While plans often change, we’re open about our work so the Atlassian Ecosystem can plan ahead to ensure a smooth experience for our customers. We’ve consolidated these updates into a single, easy to digest, post and will provide monthly updates until the end of the year.
AUI
The AUI team posted their direction for AUI 8 in the developer community in July. The community post dives deeper in to the planned changes and outlines an upgrade path.
The AUI 8 release is on hold as the AUI team work with Atlassian Server products on acceptance testing with their upcoming major versions.
Found a bug? Raise a ticket in the AUI project on our Ecosystem Jira.
Bitbucket Server
We’re planning to ship Bitbucket Server 6.0 late November, 2018. We have some exciting new features lined up for the release. For one of these features it is necessary for us to deprecate direct access to repositories on disk for apps. You can find the necessary details in the API changelog. Apart from this, we plan to add support for Java 11. Java 8 is reaching end of life in January 2019. After this time no further fixes, including security patches will be available for it. As a core dependency for Bitbucket Server such patches are critical. Also, in Bitbucket Server 6.0, we will end support for all versions before Git 2.11:
- Versions before Bitbucket Server 6.0 support Git 2.2.0 and higher, excluding Git 2.12.2 on Windows (see supported platforms for details).
- After 6.0 we will require Git 2.11.0 or newer, excluding Git 2.12.2 on Windows.
Confluence Server
In 6.10 (Data Center), we introduced a new way to handle resource intensive tasks in a sandbox (now called ‘external process pool’). This started with document conversions and coming soon in 6.12 we will also be handling PDF exports in the same way.
The external process pool isn’t available for add-ons at present, but this is something we might consider doing in the future.
In the upcoming release of Confluence 6.12, we also have a few notable changes (check out preparing for Confluence 6.12 for more details.)
- We’ve renamed “add-ons” to “apps” throughout Confluence
- New SVG icons in the editor insert menu, we recommend you update yours to match 😉
We are currently planning to release support for Java 11 in an upcoming feature release, circa October 2018. This will enable customers to run on Java 11, but with Java 8 language compatibility mode (which means features that are new to Java 11 will not work).
We are also continuing our work on the TinyMCE editor upgrade from 3.x to 4.x. This has been ongoing for some time now and hopefully everyone has checked their apps for compatibility. If not, check out how to test your add on with the upgraded TinyMCE4 editor. It will not be coming in 6.12, however we are oh so close.
Confluence Server 7.0 scope and timing is currently under review. This will include full Java 11 support. We’re still refining what other goodies will be included but are strongly contemplating upgrading Guava, removing deprecated JS Globals, converting all plugin JavaScript to AMD modules (and no longer use globals in those modules) and remove deprecated SOAP/XML-RPC methods. In order to remove the deprecated methods, we anticipate releasing new and equivalent REST API’s.
IPv6
Our customers are moving to IPv6 and Atlassian Server products are now compatible in these new environments. We’ve recently shipped IPv6 support for Bitbucket Server (v5.8), Confluence Server (v6.9), Jira Service Desk Server (v3.14), Jira Server(v7.11). Portfolio for Jira Server version 2.15 is compatible with Jira Server 7.11 and is, therefore, IPv6 compliant. We are working on making Bamboo IPv6 compliant and will be shipping that in September. We plan to make FeCru compliant in 2019 and have no plans at the moment to add support for Hipchat Data Center.
There is more information and implementation advice available in the product release notes.
Jira Software
We’re planning to ship Jira Software 8.0 in late 2018. This release will include:
- Improvements to the search sub-system via a Lucene upgrade
- Frontend improvements such as jQuery library updates and deprecation of global variables in favour of AMD modules (for more details, see this post)
- Agile and Kanban board performance improvements
- An upgrade to use new Java 11-compatible platform components and libraries
- Several other end-user features, which will be unveiled closer to the release
EAP
Between now and the release of 8.0, we will release Early Access Program (EAP) milestones once every 2 weeks. More information on the 8.0 Early Access Program can be found here.
Java 11
Jira 8.0 will be working with Oracle JDK 8 and OpenJDK 11. This means that Java 11 features will not be supported in the source code (Java 8 compatibility mode). Hence, we will only announce limited Java 11 support without making Jira officially compatible with Java 11 until a future 8.x release. This will give app vendors time to update their products before we announce official compatibility with Java 11. Most likely, this will take place in January or February 2019. After we announce the official compatibility with Java 11, we will also strive to have OpenJDK 11 bundled with the Jira installer.
Jira Performance Testing tool
We're excited to announce that our Jira Performance Tests (JPT) beta tooling is open for early access! The Jira Performance Tests help you test your apps at scale. For more details and how to get started, check out the development community blog post.
Jira Service Desk Server
In Jira Service Desk 4.0, we'll be updating our APIs to use Core Java Data types and Exceptions. We're introducing this change to make it easier to develop on Jira Service Desk. You can read the full deprecation notice.
In accordance with the Java API Policy for Jira, we'll be permanently removing com.atlassian.fugue with the release of Jira Service Desk 4.0. You will need to update any scripts, integrations or apps that make requests to endpoints returning com.atlassian.fugue to use Core Java Data types and Exceptions instead.
Java 11
We’re in the process of upgrading our Server products to support Java 11. Jira Software, Bitbucket Server, Confluence Server are continuing their work as mentioned above with Portfolio for Jira and Jira Service Desk joining recently. Bamboo, FeCru and Crowd have yet to roadmap this work, but it is our intention that all maintained Server products will provide support for Java 11. Please check here for more details.
Have questions
If you have any questions or concerns about any of the changes mentioned here please raise a ticket in the Ecosystem Developer Service Desk.