5 Exceptional Community-Made Resources for Building Atlassian Apps

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If you're planning to build a Forge app, our documentation is a great place to start. But there are a lot of excellent resources that you might not know about. Community members are always creating new tools and resources because they want to solve a problem for themselves. Some decide to pay it forward and share that knowledge because they see a need among their peers. This shows the value of the Atlassian community, where folks look out for each other and volunteer their time to help others learn and grow. 

In this article, we'll go over five resources that can help you develop Forge applications quickly and efficiently using a variety of tools.

A simpler way to create Custom UI Modules

In this talk from Team '22, you'll learn the basics of Forge and how to use the new Forge Dev Kit. Watch and see how Hannes Obweger, co-founder and co-CEO from Fine Software builds a Forge app live in less than 8 minutes. If you already have some familiarity with Forge, it may be helpful to skip to the 10-minute mark. 

The Forge Dev Kit is a zero-config toolkit for building Forge applications, built on Typescript, React, Emotion, and Next.js. Follow the thorough getting started tutorial to get up and running and start creating modules you can port to any new or existing Forge app.

Custom UI, step by step

Watching a video is great, but getting to take technology for a spin yourself is an even better way to grow your skills. This tutorial from the team at Element Apps will help you build a simple Jira application that adds user-generated information to Jira issues, which provides a great intro into Custom UI. If you're a beginner, it also takes you through the main features of Forge, which will help you build the technical skills you'll need to create a new app. 

Before you start this tutorial, it might be helpful to do the Jira Hello World tutorial or the Confluence Hello World tutorial.

Head back to class

From environment setup to publishing, Jira Cloud App Development on Forge is a course that walks you through everything you need to know to start developing your own Jira apps. With over 12 years of experience in the Atlassian ecosystem, Swiftix Software founder Matt Muschol walks you through all things Forge.

The course covers everything from an introduction to what a Jira app is to helping you build two apps from scratch, as well as guidance for getting them published on the Atlassian Marketplace. It's a truly comprehensive look at everything you need to know to get started.

Streamline projects with multiple Custom UIs

Custom UI is a great way to create an app that looks and feels exactly how you want. However, configuring an app with one or more Custom UIs can be challenging and time consuming: Developers need to go into each Custom UI project and perform multiple steps, or write a custom script. 

The NX Forge plugin from Tobias Binna of ToolsPlus lets you easily build, scaffold and scale Forge apps with multiple custom UIs by extracting shared code into libraries. This helps remove some of the overhead that comes with setting up a project, allowing you to focus more on building out your idea.

Add caching to your Forge app

One of the projects that came out of Codegeist 2021 was Workspace Cleaner for Confluence, which helps users identify inactive pages in their workspace. To determine which pages are inactive, the app makes an API call to get a list of all pages in the space and then queries page watchers, comments, and views. The volume of calls (especially for spaces with many pages) increased response time.

To lower response time and ensure a snappier user experience, the team behind Workspace Cleaner implemented caching – lowering response time considerably. Even better, they wrote a tutorial about it, sharing their learnings with the community. Read it on Archit Shinde's blog.

Learn, share, grow

Community-created resources fill an important need to help developers build apps more easily, helping everyone develop new ideas. And if you have a question or run into an issue, the Atlassian Developer Community has your back. Try searching previous posts and see if anyone else has had the same challenge you're having, or share a resource you've created.