Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Great products from Atlassian

I must admit that I've been a great fan of Atlassian, the company and its products. Great tools made for developers. Open source user, contributor and open source friendly company.
Great products, and they are Java based. Noone will ever say "Java is slow" (unless they stay in the caves, still hunting and gathering foods) when they have used Confluence or JIRA.

We used both  JIRA and Confluence at work.

I personally use Confluence for my personal content and knowledge repository.
I really liked it, just nice. Just as I need it. I can attach documents in it, version the document, attach pictures, etc. It's much better than folder or event some famous "document management". Of course only for my personal requirements point of view.

The other thing that I like is the architecture of the product, especially Confluence. It scales well, the search engine is based on Apache Lucene, it deploys stand alone on Tomcat, and also on many other application servers. It uses OSGi based on Apache Felix. So many good concept applied at the right spots. Another plus thing for me is, it supports PostgreSQL as one of the default databases for production. For me this is a big plus, as most of my personal production systems run on PostgreSQL.

Personally I think Confluence is much better structured (or architected) product than JIRA.

First, in term of the search engine, it's way much better. I don't know why JIRA couldn't have such good search capability as Confluence (e.g. it's difficult to find attachments or issues with attachments). Also the search completion as well.

Second thing is the backup and upgrade compatibility. After running for production a few years, it is so much easier to backup and restore Confluence, and it's much more difficult to backup and restore. Likewise the upgrade of versions.

Just from using such products I have learned so much for the products. Many items went into our products' wish lists... or at least my personal wish lists for our company's products.

PS: I am not related or getting paid by Atlassian. I am just a satisfied customer.

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