20 November 2009

With pleasure, Atlassian presents Atlassian Gadgets 2.0.

This release of Atlassian Gadgets contains the features and improvements that will allow Confluence to display and publish gadgets. With the upcoming Confluence 3.1 release, you will be able to add gadgets to a wiki page. Confluence will also publish gadgets, so that you can include Confluence gadgets in JIRA or on a Confluence page.

The Atlassian Gadgets JavaScript Framework​ is now part of Atlassian Gadgets. Before this release, the JavaScript framework was available only to gadget developers in JIRA 4.0. With Gadgets 2.0, gadget developers can use the JavaScript framework in the upcoming release of Confluence 3.1 and future releases of all Atlassian applications.

Atlassian Gadgets 2.0 introduces gadget subscriptions. Note: This feature is not yet available in any Atlassian applications. When implemented in the applications, this feature will allow administrators to make all the gadgets from one application available in another application. For example, let's say you have a JIRA site that publishes some gadgets and a Confluence site that can display gadgets. The Confluence administrator would not need to add each gadget individually. Instead, your Confluence site could subscribe to JIRA's gadgets, making all your JIRA gadgets immediately available for inclusion on Confluence pages.

Highlights of this Release

This release of Atlassian Gadgets contains the features and improvements that will allow Confluence to display and publish gadgets. The following features are planned for the upcoming Confluence 3.1 release:

• Confluence will publish gadgets, so that you can include Confluence gadgets in JIRA or on a Confluence page.
• You will be able to add gadgets to a wiki page. This means that you can embed a gadget within the text as part of the page content, or build a dashboard-like wiki page displaying a number of gadgets. The gadgets can display data from your Confluence, JIRA or Bamboo site. You can even display content from somewhere else entirely, for example by adding a Google gadget to a Confluence page.

Atlassian Gadgets now incorporates the Atlassian Gadgets JavaScript Framework​. Before this release, the JavaScript framework was available only to gadget developers in JIRA 4.0. With Gadgets 2.0, gadget developers can now use the JavaScript framework in the upcoming release of Confluence 3.1 and future releases of all Atlassian applications. See the sample OAuth gadget for a simple example of how to use the JavaScript framework.

Atlassian Gadgets 2.0 introduces gadget subscription. This feature allows administrators to include all the gadgets published by one application into the directory of another application. We call this 'subscribing' to the application's gadgets.

Please note: Although this feature is now part of the framework, it has not yet been included into any Atlassian applications. We plan to make it available in future releases of Confluence, JIRA and others.

To make use of this feature, you will need two or more applications that support the feature. For example, if you have a JIRA site that makes some gadgets available and a Confluence site that can display gadgets, then your Confluence site can subscribe to your JIRA gadgets. There is no need for the Confluence administrator to enable each JIRA gadget individually. The JIRA gadgets will show up in the Confluence macro browser, and Confluence users will be able to add the JIRA gadgets to their wiki pages.

This release brings number of bug fixes and improvements. The full list is below. The following deserve a specific mention:

• The Atlassian Gadgets framework now provides enhanced support for the OpenSocial data model. The framework can handle requests for information about people, groups, activities and data. It also supports the creation of an activity. Note that, although this feature is now part of the framework, it has not yet been included into any Atlassian applications. This means that gadget developers cannot yet make use of the feature, but it is available for building into future application releases.
• Gadgets added to a dashboard from the directory will now reflect the proper locale immediately. Previously, you had to reload the dashboard to see the change.
• The framework now issues improved error messages when there is a problem with loading a gadget.
• We have introduced JavaScript unit tests, as well as numerous improvements to integration tests and Selenium tests.
• There is additional JavaScript console logging when you run with minification disabled. We recommend that you turn off both batching and minification during gadget development, but turn them on during testing.
• When making HTTP requests, the Atlassian Gadgets framework now uses the JVM proxy configuration.

Complete List of Fixes in this Release