October Update on Upcoming Breaking Changes across Server Products

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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 work on AUI 8 has been resumed, with beta and final releases available in November. A test preview of the upgrade guide is available. Consult the changelog for a consolidated list of differences in this release.

Feedback for and discussion of the release is happening on our developer community post for the AUI 8 direction.

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 January, 2019. 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. We are also going to remove the notification handler plugin point and related notification API. When you need to send notifications, rather than using this deprecated API just listen to the event you are interested using a listener based on specific event and get the recipients viacom.atlassian.bitbucket.watcher.WatcherService to send notifications.

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’ll 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 recent releases we’ve added a new way to handle resource intensive tasks in a sandbox (now called ‘external process pool’). This includes document conversions PDF exports. The external process pool isn’t available for add-ons at present, but this is something we might consider doing in the future. We’ve also added new SVG icons in the editor insert menu, we recommend you update yours to match 😉

We have slightly changed our plans around Java support. Instead of supporting Java 11 initially, we will be introducing support for AdoptOpenJDK 8 in an upcoming feature release, check out Preparing for Confluence 6.13 for more details. This will ensure that customers have an alternative to the paid Oracle JDK from 2019. Confluence 6.13 will also be the next designated Enterprise release. Full Java 11 support is planned to be delivered with Confluence 7.0 sometime in 2019.

We are 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 6.13, however we are still oh so close.

Confluence Server 7.0 scope and timing is currently under review. We’re still refining what other goodies will be included but are strongly contemplating upgrading Guava and removing deprecated JS Globals. We will be removing some very old and deprecated code from 1.x through 4.x releases. We will unlikely be removing the already deprecated SOAP/XML-RPC methods at this time.

We are also working on a new Search experience to replace the existing Quick Search experience (what is quick search?). If you have an app which modified interacts with the search experience then keep an eye on the upcoming EAP page for updates.

IPv6

Our customers are moving to IPv6 and Atlassian Server products are now compatible in these new environments. Our good news this month is that we’ve shipped IPv6 support for Bamboo in the new v6.7 release. This adds to the suite of already compliant products – 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.

There is more information and implementation advice available in the product release notes.

Jira Software

We’re are are continuing our work on Jira Software 8.0 and plan to deliver the release by the end of the year.

If you haven’t started following our Jira Software 8.0 EAP program, we highly recommend taking a look at the most recently released version. The latest EAP version contains all breaking changes that will be included in the release.

The Jira Software 8.0 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 favor 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

Early Access Program (EAP)

Between now and the release of 8.0, we will continue to 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.

JSD 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 here.

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.

Questions?

Please raise a ticket in the Ecosystem Developer Service Desk.