Confluence Development Documentation and Support Issues

[Michael Bostwick]

I have been doing more and more work with Confluence download version, however, the gaps between what can be done with SOAP vs JSON, and the documentation indicating SOAP is deprecated makes development work seem precarious (developers can't do everything with JSON (and the API's are still just prototypes..) and SOAP is going away..)...

Is the recommended approach to just write code that uses the 2 formats ? To not program using the web API's and instead use java plug-ins? I'm confused by the maturity of the development resources, especially compared to JIRA which is very mature .

I don't want to rant or complain, I'm asking to understand what others may be doing or what the best approach is ?


----edit based on response---
Is there a timeline or an expectation for when atlassian plans to fix this issue and make doing dev work with out custom plug ins possible ?

Part of the issue for me is that the administrator and developers are different for our instance of Confluence, and there are different development groups as well..While the groups do of course work together to solve the problem this slows down the entire process, requires java development, and a whole mess of other things(i.e you can't just use the api and go, you have to go into making an entire plug in..)

[Sergey Svishchev]

The gaps are certainly annoying (f.e. https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/60088/what-is-the-format-of-queries-for-search-in-the-confluence-rest-api/60290and https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/275323/how-to-get-the-creator-of-an-attachment-using-confluence-rest-api...); Atlassian will probably say that you're supposed to report them to JAC, leave comments and vote.

They plan to replace all old APIs with new REST one (introduced in 5.5); it's probably safe to say that you're better off writing custom plugins in next 12 months until they polish new API.

[Adrien Ragot 2]

Hi Michael,

That's right, if you're developing for a download version of Confluence, developers mostly create java plugins that expose the REST API they want.

Those plugins can't work on OnDemand or if you don't own the Confluence server. Alternatively, people who just do scripting can use Swift's Confluence CLI which I assume wraps the APIs nicely.

Cheers,

Adrien

[Michael Bostwick]

I don't mean to change my question, but is there a timeline or an expectation for when atlassian plans to fix it and make doing dev work with out custom plug ins possible ?

[Adrien Ragot 2]

Hi Michael, I don't work at Atlassian so I can't give an official answer. Do feel free to change your question, however ;)

API stability has been a big theme for JIRA. In version 5.x, they've introducted annotations like @PublicApi. To my knowledge, the market for Confluence is different than for JIRA.

As said, it's possible to use a Java plugin for most developers, so the demand for stable REST apis probably isn't strong. What's your situation? Are you working with an OnDemand instance?