Time flies when you're having fun, which is why we can hardly believe it was one year ago that the Forge platform officially launched to the public. Since then, our team has worked hard on our product roadmap, releasing new features and always keeping the needs of our community at the front of our minds.
We created Forge with a straightforward goal: to empower developers to create their own cloud apps easily while furthering the capabilities of the Atlassian Ecosystem. And we couldn't have gotten to where we are today without you, the builders, makers and innovators. It's been amazing to watch our community dream and launch new apps, help other developers with their challenges, and join events like Developer Day and Codegeist.
Our developer community is important to us – In the last year, we've addressed many Forge feature requests and have even more in the works. Here are a few more things we've accomplished this year to provide developers with a stronger platform and better experience on Forge.
Launching and growing developer tools
Building an app that looks and feels just right is key for our developer community. In the first year of Forge, UI Kit became generally available. UI Kit is a great way to quickly and easily create a user interface for your app that blends in seamlessly with the native Atlassian product UI.
Our team also worked hard this year to enhance the developer experience by strengthening Confluence REST and GraphQL APIs. Our internal teams were the motivator behind developing these APIs, but we soon realised that the entire community could benefit from them.
Finally, we were excited to announce at Developer Day 2022 that we'll be releasing a Forge Mobile preview by the end of the year. Before Forge's second birthday, you'll be able to build apps that plug into the Jira and Confluence mobile experience.
Faster issue resolution and better metric tracking
Addressing user issues quickly and tracking app performance is key for providing user support and growing your business. In February, we shipped the first version of Forge app monitoring, helping you gain deeper insight into key metrics on app health and performance. We followed up this release with more monitoring capabilities in May, including the ability to filter metrics by site.
Added new products, extension points, and custom fields
This year, we expanded Forge onto even more products, including Jira, Confluence, Compass, and Jira Service Management. We also added new extension points, including 10 for Confluence and 13 for Jira, and are continuing to build new extension points to reach Connect parity.
We also introduced Forge custom fields, which allows Jira admins to easily define custom fields tailored to their team's needs. 20 new apps are already using Forge Custom Fields – and growing.
Increased storage, async processing, and new OAuth capabilities
This year, we increased Forge platform limits and quotas, including doubling storage capacity. We're currently working towards custom schemas and supporting query by value – a top requested storage feature.
In late 2021, we rolled out the Async events API, which allows developers to push events to a queue for background processing. This made it possible for Forge developers to execute long-running background jobs in their apps.
We also added a new External Authentication tool, so developers can simplify OAuth 2.0 authentication with external providers like Google, Slack, GitHub, and more. This has made it easier than ever to build integrations with third party platforms.
Additionally, we released the Secure Storage API, which is used to securely store secrets (such as API credentials).
Stay on top of new releases
We accomplished a lot in the first year of Forge, and there are always new things coming your way. Keep track of what's coming soon with the Forge Changelog and our public roadmap.
Our team also hosts quarterly Forge Roadmap Webinars, which allows us to share updates on our product roadmap directly with Marketplace Partners. You can subscribe to the developer community events group to get notifications for upcoming webinars.
Happy birthday, Forge. Here's to another year of building!