Between the trials, tragedy and the triumph, the 8th instalment of Atlassian FedEx day came and went. 49 projects were submitted in the biggest and the best one yet! Projects spanned the entire gamut; from playing shiny new toys like Skitch, EC2, Groovy to parallelising Maven downloads and adding supportability to our products.

FedEx days have been a regular Atlassian event since 2005 and it's still going strong. What the hell is it? If you want to find out more, read Mike's inaugural blog about FedEx. For more information on FedEx 8 check out our page on Confluence

The Best

Tom Davies, formerly a Confluence developer and now a Cenquan, took out the coveted FedEx trophy with his NNTP Server for Confluence. Tom tried to solve the problem: "How do you keep up with recent changes from a Wiki without being overwhelmed, but without missing things you want to see?" He decided that RSS wasn't the way to go, and NNTP's threading (amongst other things) made it a winner. Tom's presentation also impressed the inner geek in all with hist cool retro newsreader.

"I'm shocked I made it through", Tom announced. "I put my win down to the quality quantity of jokes I made in my presentation - and people's reluctance to hand out back to back wins to Matt Ryall."

The winners of the previous two FedExes, Matt Ryall and Adrian Hempel, as well as the team of Per Fragemann and Chris Broadfoot also made it through to the finals.

Runner-up was Adrian's Elastic Bamboo that allows you run your distributed Bamboo agents in an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). He created EC2 images that let anyone instantly start up a Bamboo server and any number of Bamboo remote agents in the cloud. It also allows you to add or remove remote agents on the fly, utilising Amazon's (just about) boundless computing power by simply updating a text input field!

Matt Ryall has hit a winning formula on how to consistently make it to the final table of FedEx voting. His Expert Confluence console combined a nostalgic appeal to all those hours spent playing Doom, nice Web-2.0 transparency effects and even useful functionality! With his console, virtually all of Confluence's RPC methods can be simply accessed through a simple press of the tilde (~) key. Everything from basic search, simple go-to. It even has history for even easier usage.

Ever wanted to turn Confluence into Slashdot? Now you can with Chris Broadfoot's Confluence Karma! You can moderate a comment up or down, see a poster's overall Karma and all that jazz. Per joined forces with Chris to implement a comments slider. The "Sexy Slider" lets you hide and show comments based on the posting date, so you can quickly hide old or poorly moderated comments.

For more details on the finalists, check out their projects' Confluence pages.

1. Tom's NNTP Server
2. Adrian's Elastic Bamboo
3. Matt's Expert Confluence Console
4. Per & Chris's Sexy comment slider & Karma

The Rest

With some 49 FedEx projects submitted for FedEx 8, many cool projects missed out on the finals. You can see details of many of the projects on the FedEx 8 Confluence page.

My personal favourite project for the day was Chris Owen's Macro AOP plugin. This allowed you apply an aspect across all macros in a Confluence instance or space. For example, you can replace the entire content of a particular macro between 430pm and 500pm each day with just a single AOP expression. This was seriously evil.

Product installation was also in vogue with Brenden Bain, Samuel Le Berrigaud and Matt "Viking" Jensen all taking a dip. Brenden used apt-get, Sam attempted an Atlassian Uber-Installer and Matt Jensen wrote a GUI front end for the Atlassian Application Manager.

On the testing front Brendan Humphreys began working on "Quiver - a Mutation tester for Clover 2". The idea was to use Clover's per-test coverage data to find which classes were hit by a particular test, and vice-versa. You can then use this information to find the subset of tests that will exercise a given mutation. This avoids the need to rerun the entire test suite, giving you a much more efficient mutation testing framework.

Don Brown ventured into the world of Grails to write a server monitoring application. Co-Founder, Mike Cannon-Brookes revisited his love hate relationship with GWT for a cross application embedded chat client. Despite a lot of swearing early on, he did come out the other end glowing about GWT. Other interesting bits an pieces was Nick Pellow's Skitch slap application that allowed you to automatically upload Skitch images to JIRA. Pete Moore's project allowed you to open any file in FishEye using IntelliJ IDEA's Ctrl+Shift+N shortcut.

Chris Mountford, to much applause from Ian (JIRA support lead), made the "JIRA Modz Detector". This extension to JIRA allows our support engineers to identify any modified files / JARs in a JIRA instance immediately. Brad Baker also worked on a hodge podge of useful support & plugin resource improvements. On the resources front, you can now including minifiable web resources (so plugins can have minified CSS & Javascript files) as well as optionally include a JS file at the bottom of the page rather than the top of the page for performance reasons. For support, JIRA can now produce Apache CLF formatted logs.

Overall, another enjoyable day for the developers and congrats to all for delivering so many cool and useful projects!

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Atlassian Partner EditGrid just put out an awesome new release of their core product, the EditGrid Online Spreadsheet.

I'll start with a quick re-cap: EditGrid is a brower-based spreadsheet that allows to collaborate (in real time!) with your colleagues. The experience is amazing. I'm not an expert Excel jockey, but I find the EditGrid UI and editing experience superior to its offline counterpart. It offers a wiki-like experience, in that multiple people can collaborate and every change is versioned and kept in history. EditGrid can also imports and export Excel files, so there's no barrier to getting started, and no fence to lock you in.

Wiki-like spreadsheet editing -- sounds like just the thing for Confluence, no? You might be working on numbers instead of words, but you still need an always accessible, canonical version of a document, great searching to find it, a simple URL to share it, and a version history to show you who's changed it. So, EditGrid created a plugin for Confluence that allows you to embed an EditGrid spreadsheet right in a wiki page. I love it, and find myself using it more and more often.

I was pretty excited to hear from David Lee, CEO of EditGrid, who let me know about their new release: EditGrid now offers Data On Demand. They've taken information from a ton of places on the net and allowed you to add live data into a spreadsheet. A simple example would be a call that gets the current price of YHOO stock, or the current exchange rate between a US dollar and an Australian dollar. That data will be updated every time the spreadsheet is viewed, and the you can base calculations off of it.

This live Data on Demand is only available on the Hosted version of EditGrid at the moment, but we hope to see it in the Confluence plugin soon.

Example Spreadsheets

• Live data from Alexa, Compete and Yahoo! Finance is used to calculate a startup valuation: http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/Web_Startup_Valuation_Model.new
• Analyst estimates and recommendations come together in this spreadsheet to help you compare a stock with a few of its competitors: https://www.editgrid.com/tnc/dave/Peer_Estimate_Report.new

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Atlassian Partner EditGrid just put out an awesome new release of their core product, the EditGrid Online Spreadsheet.

I'll start with a quick re-cap: EditGrid is a brower-based spreadsheet that allows to collaborate (in real time!) with your colleagues. The experience is amazing. I'm not an expert Excel jockey, but I find the EditGrid UI and editing experience superior to its offline counterpart. It offers a wiki-like experience, in that multiple people can collaborate and every change is versioned and kept in history. EditGrid can also imports and export Excel files, so there's no barrier to getting started, and no fence to lock you in.

Wiki-like spreadsheet editing -- sounds like just the thing for Confluence, no? You might be working on numbers instead of words, but you still need an always accessible, canonical version of a document, great searching to find it, a simple URL to share it, and a version history to show you who's changed it. So, EditGrid created a plugin for Confluence that allows you to embed an EditGrid spreadsheet right in a wiki page. I love it, and find myself using it more and more often.

I was pretty excited to hear from David Lee, CEO of EditGrid, who let me know about their new release: EditGrid now offers Data On Demand. They've taken information from a ton of places on the net and allowed you to add live data into a spreadsheet. A simple example would be a call that gets the current price of YHOO stock, or the current exchange rate between a US dollar and an Australian dollar. That data will be updated every time the spreadsheet is viewed, and the you can base calculations off of it.

This live Data on Demand is only available on the Hosted version of EditGrid at the moment, but we hope to see it in the Confluence plugin soon.

Example Spreadsheets

• Live data from Alexa, Compete and Yahoo! Finance is used to calculate a startup valuation: http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/david/Web_Startup_Valuation_Model.new
• Analyst estimates and recommendations come together in this spreadsheet to help you compare a stock with a few of its competitors: https://www.editgrid.com/tnc/dave/Peer_Estimate_Report.new

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Introducing Balsamiq Mockups, the latest plug-in to join the Confluence plugin eco-system.

Now anyone can easily create a mockup in minutes within Confluence with Balsamiq Mockups' drag and drop functionality. This plugin allows you to bring the whole team together--everyone from product managers to designers, developers and customers-- to collaborate on one mock up before even one line of code is committed.

Created by developer superstar Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni , Balsamiq Mockups offers several snazzy features designed with the team in mind. They include:

Iteration in real-time: Teams can modify drawings easily through the course of a meeting. Explore different designs in minutes.
Scalablity: Over 50 pre-built controls allow for a variety of mock-ups, from a simple website to full-fledged application.
Focus on Functionality: Hand drawn UI means more focus on creating a great mockup and not sweat the details.

Try a live demo or simply check out this tour of Balsamiq Mockups to see how easy it is to create a mockup in just minutes:

About Balsamiq

Balsamiq Mockups was created out of the desire to design a product to enable the entire team to collaborate on mock-ups in a field where most software options where either too complex or not powerful enough to use. As Peldi explains, "In a previous life, part of my job was writing feature specifications, which always included software mockups. At the time, most people just coded the feature up so that they could take a screenshot. Then a product manager I worked with asked me for help putting her vision into a spec. Because PM's don't inherently have photoshop skills, they have no way of expressing the vision that's in their head," he continues, "I looked for a tool for her to use and couldn't find one. That's why I thought of building a UI prototyping tool that everyone could use. That was when the idea of creating Balsamiq was born."

Balsamiq Mockups for Confluence are available for a 30-day evaluation. Pricing starts at $600 for a 25 user license and includes 12 months of maintenance. For all the details, please click here.

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I must apologize that these results have been so long in coming. The developers did their part and got me their votes on time. But I ended up at Enterprise 2.0 and our Boston Users' Group last week, which turned out to be pretty all absorbing, leaving no time for Codegeist. E2.0 was an entertaining conference; the collaboration/social-software market has made tremendous strides in the last year. And I really enjoyed meeting many Boston-area customers (and a few plugin developers) at the Users' Group.

But, to the topic at hand, the winners of Codegeist III. To remind everyone, there is one category for each of our pluggable products, and one winner in each category who will receive all this and more. I'll be going in reserve chronological order, with our newest product first:

May I have the envelopes, please?

Crucible

The Plugin Framework in Crucible is brand new. It shipped with Crucible 1.5, which is only a few months old. And the documentation for is still, shall we say, rudimentary. But we wanted to make sure that Crucible was in Codegeist, and that the brave early-adopters could give it a try.

Consequently, we had a handful of solid entries, and one winner: Ross Rowe's Crucible Reporting Plugin. It allows you to generate reports about previous code reviews for statistics gathering, tracking trends or compliance and auditing reasons. This was a solid entry, exploring the new territory of Crucible plugin development, and demonstrating some of what is going to be possible as the Crucible plugin framework matures.

FishEye

FishEye, likewise, has only had its plugin framework for a few months. Shipping with FishEye 1.5, the plugin framework is going to open new horizons for customization. In Codegeist III, developers got their first chance to explore.

Dan Hardiker of Adaptavist was able to get the very first FishEye plugin working, the Developer Report Plugin. Like Ross, he started with a simple reporting framework, but he was able to demonstrate the potential of plugins in FishEye, and point out some valuable directions for further development. He also took the extra step of providing tons of priceless feedback on the process itself, which will help us flesh out the documentation and capabilities of FishEye plugins.

Crowd

The Crowd category winner is Graham Bakay's Grails Integration plugin. This is 1) and incredibly useful plugin that can expand Crowd to lots of new projects, 2) works exactly as advertised 3) is beautifully and throughly documented, and 4) takes advantage of our Atlassian's recent salivating over the coolness that is Grails. Best of all, active development is continuing at a quick pace and I'm sure this is going to prove to be a valuable tool in the Grails toolkit. Unfortunately, a Crowd Connector Plugin doesn't lend itself to interesting screenshots, but trust me, the technology is dead sexy.

Bamboo

The first place prize for Bamboo goes to Jonathan Doklovic for his Pre- / Post-Build Command Plugin. This is terrific plugin that enables all sorts of new possibilities for Bamboo. It's one of those gateway plugins that opens up a whole new category of customizations. It gives admins the tools to connect Bamboo even more tightly to their build process.

Confluence

As usual, Confluence was our most fiercely contested category, with almost thirty entries. After much discussion and debate, the Confluence developers selected Martin Breest's Confluence Page State Plugin.

Here are a few of the reasons that the developers liked Martin's plugin so much:

JIRA

The JIRA developers selected Sharvin Ragavan's Scheme Configuration Plugin.

The Scheme Config plugin is a full and detailed solution to a problem that many instances of JIRA with lots of projects run into. A lot of thought clearly went into designing the solution, and the plugin is well documented. Sharvin also made use of several more advanced techniques with ajax interaction. The developer judges even mentioned that they wanted to recommend this to the support team as a diagnostic tool.

So this officially concludes Codegeist III. Congratulations to all the winners, and a huge thank you to everyone who entered. I'll be contacting the winners this week about your prizes.

We were all super happy with the entries this year -- we had entries in every category and lots of new ground was broken for plugin development in the new products. We had some very polished plugins submitted for the more established categories. There were lots of first-class entries, and next week I'm going to do another post highlighting some of our favorite honorable mention candidates, so keep an eye out.

Over the next few days, all of these plugins will be moved into the main Plugin Libraries for continued use and development. In the meantime, feel free to use them and send feedback to the developers -- we love to hear how things go in the real world.

If there is anything that we can do to help you in your plugin development efforts, please let me know. We have big plans for improving plugin development this year. I'd love to hear your feedback on the whole Atlassian plugin process. What can we do better? What could be made easier?

Thanks again, and I've already starting planning for next year's contest!

• Comments Off

I must apologize that these results have been so long in coming. The developers did their part and got me their votes on time. But I ended up at Enterprise 2.0 and our Boston Users' Group last week, which turned out to be pretty all absorbing, leaving no time for Codegeist. E2.0 was an entertaining conference; the collaboration/social-software market has made tremendous strides in the last year. And I really enjoyed meeting many Boston-area customers (and a few plugin developers) at the Users' Group.

But, to the topic at hand, the winners of Codegeist III. To remind everyone, there is one category for each of our pluggable products, and one winner in each category who will receive all this and more. I'll be going in reserve chronological order, with our newest product first:

May I have the envelopes, please?

Crucible

The Plugin Framework in Crucible is brand new. It shipped with Crucible 1.5, which is only a few months old. And the documentation for is still, shall we say, rudimentary. But we wanted to make sure that Crucible was in Codegeist, and that the brave early-adopters could give it a try.

Consequently, we had a handful of solid entries, and one winner: Ross Rowe's Crucible Reporting Plugin. It allows you to generate reports about previous code reviews for statistics gathering, tracking trends or compliance and auditing reasons. This was a solid entry, exploring the new territory of Crucible plugin development, and demonstrating some of what is going to be possible as the Crucible plugin framework matures.

FishEye

FishEye, likewise, has only had its plugin framework for a few months. Shipping with FishEye 1.5, the plugin framework is going to open new horizons for customization. In Codegeist III, developers got their first chance to explore.

Dan Hardiker of Adaptavist was able to get the very first FishEye plugin working, the Developer Report Plugin. Like Ross, he started with a simple reporting framework, but he was able to demonstrate the potential of plugins in FishEye, and point out some valuable directions for further development. He also took the extra step of providing tons of priceless feedback on the process itself, which will help us flesh out the documentation and capabilities of FishEye plugins.

Crowd

The Crowd category winner is Graham Bakay's Grails Integration plugin. This is 1) and incredibly useful plugin that can expand Crowd to lots of new projects, 2) works exactly as advertised 3) is beautifully and throughly documented, and 4) takes advantage of our Atlassian's recent salivating over the coolness that is Grails. Best of all, active development is continuing at a quick pace and I'm sure this is going to prove to be a valuable tool in the Grails toolkit. Unfortunately, a Crowd Connector Plugin doesn't lend itself to interesting screenshots, but trust me, the technology is dead sexy.

Bamboo

The first place prize for Bamboo goes to Jonathan Doklovic for his Pre- / Post-Build Command Plugin. This is terrific plugin that enables all sorts of new possibilities for Bamboo. It's one of those gateway plugins that opens up a whole new category of customizations. It gives admins the tools to connect Bamboo even more tightly to their build process.

Confluence

As usual, Confluence was our most fiercely contested category, with almost thirty entries. After much discussion and debate, the Confluence developers selected Martin Breest's Confluence Page State Plugin.

Here are a few of the reasons that the developers liked Martin's plugin so much:

JIRA

The JIRA developers selected Sharvin Ragavan's Scheme Configuration Plugin.

The Scheme Config plugin is a full and detailed solution to a problem that many instances of JIRA with lots of projects run into. A lot of thought clearly went into designing the solution, and the plugin is well documented. Sharvin also made use of several more advanced techniques with ajax interaction. The developer judges even mentioned that they wanted to recommend this to the support team as a diagnostic tool.

So this officially concludes Codegeist III. Congratulations to all the winners, and a huge thank you to everyone who entered. I'll be contacting the winners this week about your prizes.

We were all super happy with the entries this year -- we had entries in every category and lots of new ground was broken for plugin development in the new products. We had some very polished plugins submitted for the more established categories. There were lots of first-class entries, and next week I'm going to do another post highlighting some of our favorite honorable mention candidates, so keep an eye out.

Over the next few days, all of these plugins will be moved into the main Plugin Libraries for continued use and development. In the meantime, feel free to use them and send feedback to the developers -- we love to hear how things go in the real world.

If there is anything that we can do to help you in your plugin development efforts, please let me know. We have big plans for improving plugin development this year. I'd love to hear your feedback on the whole Atlassian plugin process. What can we do better? What could be made easier?

Thanks again, and I've already starting planning for next year's contest!

• Comments Off

I must apologize that these results have been so long in coming. The developers did their part and got me their votes on time. But I ended up at Enterprise 2.0 and our Boston Users' Group last week, which turned out to be pretty all absorbing, leaving no time for Codegeist. E2.0 was an entertaining conference; the collaboration/social-software market has made tremendous strides in the last year. And I really enjoyed meeting many Boston-area customers (and a few plugin developers) at the Users' Group.

But, to the topic at hand, the winners of Codegeist III. To remind everyone, there is one category for each of our pluggable products, and one winner in each category who will receive all this and more. I'll be going in reserve chronological order, with our newest product first:

May I have the envelopes, please?

Crucible

The Plugin Framework in Crucible is brand new. It shipped with Crucible 1.5, which is only a few months old. And the documentation for is still, shall we say, rudimentary. But we wanted to make sure that Crucible was in Codegeist, and that the brave early-adopters could give it a try.

Consequently, we had a handful of solid entries, and one winner: Ross Rowe's Crucible Reporting Plugin. It allows you to generate reports about previous code reviews for statistics gathering, tracking trends or compliance and auditing reasons. This was a solid entry, exploring the new territory of Crucible plugin development, and demonstrating some of what is going to be possible as the Crucible plugin framework matures.

FishEye

FishEye, likewise, has only had its plugin framework for a few months. Shipping with FishEye 1.5, the plugin framework is going to open new horizons for customization. In Codegeist III, developers got their first chance to explore.

Dan Hardiker of Adaptavist was able to get the very first FishEye plugin working, the Developer Report Plugin. Like Ross, he started with a simple reporting framework, but he was able to demonstrate the potential of plugins in FishEye, and point out some valuable directions for further development. He also took the extra step of providing tons of priceless feedback on the process itself, which will help us flesh out the documentation and capabilities of FishEye plugins.

Crowd

The Crowd category winner is Graham Bakay's Grails Integration plugin. This is 1) and incredibly useful plugin that can expand Crowd to lots of new projects, 2) works exactly as advertised 3) is beautifully and throughly documented, and 4) takes advantage of our Atlassian's recent salivating over the coolness that is Grails. Best of all, active development is continuing at a quick pace and I'm sure this is going to prove to be a valuable tool in the Grails toolkit. Unfortunately, a Crowd Connector Plugin doesn't lend itself to interesting screenshots, but trust me, the technology is dead sexy.

Bamboo

The first place prize for Bamboo goes to Jonathan Doklovic for his Pre- / Post-Build Command Plugin. This is terrific plugin that enables all sorts of new possibilities for Bamboo. It's one of those gateway plugins that opens up a whole new category of customizations. It gives admins the tools to connect Bamboo even more tightly to their build process.

Confluence

As usual, Confluence was our most fiercely contested category, with almost thirty entries. After much discussion and debate, the Confluence developers selected Martin Breest's Confluence Page State Plugin.

Here are a few of the reasons that the developers liked Martin's plugin so much:

JIRA

The JIRA developers selected Sharvin Ragavan's Scheme Configuration Plugin.

The Scheme Config plugin is a full and detailed solution to a problem that many instances of JIRA with lots of projects run into. A lot of thought clearly went into designing the solution, and the plugin is well documented. Sharvin also made use of several more advanced techniques with ajax interaction. The developer judges even mentioned that they wanted to recommend this to the support team as a diagnostic tool.

So this officially concludes Codegeist III. Congratulations to all the winners, and a huge thank you to everyone who entered. I'll be contacting the winners this week about your prizes.

We were all super happy with the entries this year -- we had entries in every category and lots of new ground was broken for plugin development in the new products. We had some very polished plugins submitted for the more established categories. There were lots of first-class entries, and next week I'm going to do another post highlighting some of our favorite honorable mention candidates, so keep an eye out.

Over the next few days, all of these plugins will be moved into the main Plugin Libraries for continued use and development. In the meantime, feel free to use them and send feedback to the developers -- we love to hear how things go in the real world.

If there is anything that we can do to help you in your plugin development efforts, please let me know. We have big plans for improving plugin development this year. I'd love to hear your feedback on the whole Atlassian plugin process. What can we do better? What could be made easier?

Thanks again, and I've already starting planning for next year's contest!

• Comments Off

Gliffy has announced an upgrade to their collaborative diagramming tool for Confluence. Gliffy is a plugin for Confluence that allows you to create diagrams that can be shared and/or collaborated on with other wiki users. If you're still trying to convince your boss to buy Confluence, try demoing Gliffy, it's got some sweeeeet eye candy to match its utility!

Gliffy 1.4 includes dozens of new features and bug fixes including:

• Automatic diagram sizing: your diagram will start on a huge 5000x5000 pixel canvass so you can go crazy with your ideas, but upon Saving your work it's automatically resized to fit your wiki page


• New and updated symbol libraries so you have lots more shapes to work with


• The ability to upload your own artwork into your diagrams (e.g., see above screen capture)

To learn more, visit the Confluence plugin page for Gliffy or read the Gliffy 1.4 blog.

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If you've visited www.atlassian.com lately you've seen the rainbow. Last week we updated the product sections on our site and:

• gave each product its own colour. Here's how the JIRA homepage looks now (left) and before:




• stuck in links where you can find them:


(In case you were wondering, that's our president wearing the bear hat. One day that picture surfaced on our intranet dashboard. We had to use it. ;) )


• created 'Learn' pages to better introduce each product:




• and lots more, which collectively made up 1,581 file updates. (Many thanks to Zach, our webdev star!)

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