Atlassian Cloud or OnDemand?

[Steffen Stamprath]

I have some little questions to the Cloud solution:

1. What is exactly the different? Or ist it the same (renamed)?
2. And if I develop a plugin for that must I always hosting the source code on my own server. Or can I upload it into a central place by atlassian?

Thank you in advance!

[Sebastian Schöne]

I also asked myself, insightful answers!

[Steffen Stamprath]

okay, this information brings me further. Thank you!

One last question: Ho work Webhooks? Communicate the JIRA installation to my plugin (JS) or to my server? What happen at the server?

[Stephen Deutsch]

Webhooks communicate with your server.  Imagine that an action occurs, like a ticket being created.  If you have a webhook as part of your addon, then it will send a message to your server notifying it of the action occurring, and then the server part of your addon might decide to do something to interact with JIRA as part of that information or maybe just store that data (depending on the logic you have there).

[Steffen Stamprath]

And the term "Atlassian Connect" is the framework which the Atlassian Cloud uses (plugin)?
I ask only because I found very complicated at the beginning that there are three terms all are listening to different things (Atlassian Cloud, Atlassian OnDemand, Atlassian Connect).

And a Cloud Plugin only can communicate to the Atlassian Installation over the Atlassian REST interface? Or is there a further way like a normal Server plugin? (Custom fields, JAVA Code on Atlassian, ...)?

[Stephen Deutsch]

Yes, Atlassian Conect is the framework that is used to create addons for Atlassian's Cloud versions of applications. As I said, Cloud and OnDemand are the same (OnDemand is the old term and it has been COMPLETELY replaced by Cloud). Cloud plugins can only communicate over REST and RPC (for Confluence, at least, where it is still available). Besides that, there are a few more things that are available (webhooks, javascript calls, etc.). There is no way to integrate it into the product like a normal Server plugin (no custom fields, no Java code running within the product).

[Steffen Stamprath]

Hi Stephen,

when I create the addon on my own server, I understand it correct, that my server receive data from the atlassian installation? I mean the customers must have a big trust to the addon, or is my server only for the html/JS/... and the client of the user made the calculation/display of the data. And my server no see the data fromm the customer?

[Stephen Deutsch]

It depends what kind of addon you create.  You can create a static addon, in which all calculations are performed by Javascript in the browser, and no content is sent to the server, only the original HTML/JS is transferred.  However, this has some limitations, namely that you can't use webhooks and that you are limited to what you can do with Javascript in the browser.

In order to do anything more advanced than this, you will need to have a standard addon, which can communicate with the server via JWT tokens.  Naturally a little higher level of trust is involved, but there are also security precautions you can take, if you want.  All Cloud addons create a user that is associated with the addon that is used to interact with your instance.  If you restrict this user, then the addon is also restricted.

[Stephen Deutsch]

Hi Steffen,

1. They are the exact same thing, they just renamed OnDemand to Cloud
2. If you develop an addon for Cloud, it must be stored on a separate server.  Atlassian has no central place to store the code.  Cloud addons are not like Server plugins; they do not run within the server.  Cloud addons are actually little iframes (and server calls) which can interact with the Confluence instance hosted by Atlassian.  Therefore they can be coded in any language, instead of having to be in Java for Server plugins.