Last week we showed you AtlasCamp 2010 videos about Confluence 4.0 macro migration, Atlassian plugin framework, and DVCS with Mercurial. This week we’re excited to highlight three new videos about Active Objects, functional and integration testing, and easy Confluence macros. Stay tuned for more video highlights next week.
Active Objects – Samuel Le Berrigaud
Sam introduces and walks us through Active Objects, a completely new way to efficiently and quickly store and access plugin data. Active Objects–which is currently being developed–will enable your plugin to perform significantly better. Highlights include:
- Many plugins need to store a lot of data, but the current storage framework can be inefficient
- Active Objects provides access to Atlassian product databases with an ORM
- Active Objects will support all major databases already supported by Atlassian products
- Backup and restore for a product will work just the same as it does now, automatically including a backup of the Active Objects database
Take a look at the Active Objects project to see its source and get involved. Please leave a comment if you’re interested in trying out Active Objects. We’re eager to get early feedback to make sure Active Objects is as awesome for each of you as it is for us.
Functional and Integration Testing for the Lazy – Don Brown
Don walks us through his incomplete Confluence Like Button plugin to show how one can use Atlassian Selenium to test AJAX. Highlights include:
- Functional and integration testing is difficult, and unfortunately there’s no silver bullet
- Atlassian Selenium is a library that makes integration and functional testing much easier
- AJAX specifically is difficult to test because it’s asynchronous, but Atlassian Selenium helps
- Atlassian Selenium lets one script UI actions to click links, fill in fields, and do anything else required for a meaningful functional or integration test
Making Confluence Macros Easy (for the user) – Dave Taylor
Dave walks us through Confluence macros and how they’ll be different in Confluence 4.0. Highlights include:
- The macro browser is the only way for macros to be discovered
- A good description and catchy image in the macro browser is very important to drive macro adoption
- Be sure to always add <parameters /> to your configuration. Otherwise some macro configuration won’t be properly loaded