Whether you are building a new app or refactoring an existing app, consider our plan to use Atlaskit for new development across server and cloud. Currently, Atlassian maintains two different Atlassian Design Guidelines (ADG), one for server which directs developers to implement the frontend using Atlassian User Interface (AUI) and one for cloud which directs developers to implement the frontend using Atlaskit. This separation has presented certain challenges for both Atlassian and vendors building apps on multiple hosting types.
We have since decided that server products will begin to use Atlaskit and that Atlaskit will be added as an implementation option for the server guideline. The intention of this shift is to slowly merge the two guidelines in the future into one design system. By converging upon one design system, Atlassian aims to provide consistent, cohesive design patterns that will benefit the teams using the system.
Recommendations
If you are building or refactoring an app for server, you can now use either AUI or Atlaskit to implement the ADG. We will begin explicitly calling out how to use Atlaskit vs AUI for server products in the ADG for server. When the first part of this is published, we will share it with this community. In the long run, we expect cloud and server guidelines will begin to converge as we bring Atlaskit more and more into different server products. Once we have reached sufficient commonality between these, we will deprecate the deployment-specific guidelines and publish one canonical ADG guide that covers cloud and server – Atlaskit and AUI. After this point, new development for server should use Atlaskit.
While plans are evolving, we expect the transition to include the following:
- Existing server UI will remain as-is in the short and medium term.
- Timeframes for new UI features will vary from product to product.
- New features in server will start to be built with React.
For more information on how this change will impact your server app, please watch the recorded webinar on this topic or add a question to the community thread.