Atlassian Connect add-on Starter Kit for App Engine

atlassian_gcpAtlassian Connect add-ons are extensions written by third-party developers to augment Atlassian’s hosted software. We’d love for the Atlassian Community to host their add-ons with Google Cloud Platform.  To help out, I’m releasing Atlassian Connect Add On Starter Kit for App Engine on github.

Google App Engine is a great environment to get started hosting this sort of solution.

  • You just upload code.
  • We handle scaling for you.
  • App Engine serves up webservices with little to no config.
  • App Engine integrates well with other Google Developer Services

On the Atlassian side, as long as you write your services to respond the way Connect expects,  you can write your add-ons in whatever language or technology stack you want.

I wrote the Atlassian Connect Add On Starter Kit for App Engine to give a working example for getting started on App Engine using each of the supported languages.  Each language folder (Go, Java, Php, Python) contains code to create two applications:

Hello World – basically the Hello World example written by Atlassian with added App Engine configs to show the delta between a vanilla add-on and one configured to run on App Engine.

addon-world
The Hello World. Nothing special.

Language Check – this application scans a JIRA instance for issue titles in languages that differ from the default language, and then labels which language they are.  The idea is that you can then easily triage issues that should be routed to staff who can support that language. It takes advantage of the Google Translate API to accomplish this.

Add-on translating with the default language set to English.
Add-on translating with the default language set to Czech.

Now, all of this isn’t to say you cannot use other technologies in Google Cloud Platform to host your add-on.  You can also host on either Compute Engine or Container Engine. After you configure one of these solutions you can just follow Atlassian’s existing tutorials to create an add-on.

Anyway you want to do it, Google Cloud Platform can help the Atlassian developer community to host their applications.  If you want to write some code and have server configuration and scaling handled by us, App Engine is a good choice.  If you would rather have more control over or flexibility with the systems you run, either Compute Engine or Container Engine can be your answer.

Atlassian Connect Add On Starter Kit for App Engine

Theseus – A Promising Reason to Use Brackets

brackets_iconFrom time to time, I show off Brackets, the Open Source HTML/JavaScript/CSS editor Adobe has been working on for the past year and half.  It’s a great bit of work, and it looks great. However, a lot of people point out that there are a lot of other code editors that can be used on HTML out there.  Which is is true – so let me show you a compelling reason to use Brackets: Theseus.

Theseus is a research project that brings debugging to JavaScript in the editor. Not just debugging, but crazy real-time debugging that’s easy to understand and jump right into.  Check out the explanation of Theseus over at the Brackets team blog. And then check out the GitHub repo.   Seriously, if you work with JavaScript, do it now – you won’t regret it.

Also, just as an aside, it turns out that Brackets is up for a Readers’ Choice Award from Linux Journal.  If you’re a fan please give it your support by voting for it.