>> All right, Tim, can you introduce your company and your products?
>> MOORE: My name is Tim Moore. I work at a company called Atlassian. We develop productivity
tools for technical teams. Best known product is probably JIRA, which is an issue tracker,
a place to track your bugs or support issues or anything like that. We also have a product
called Confluence, which is our Enterprise Wiki. You can use it for documentation, for
requirements planning, really for any kind of collaborative document management. We also
have a series of other development tools. The one is called FishEye. That's for source
code repository management and exploration. We got one called Crucible, which is for source
code review. One called Crowd, which is a single-sign on tool. One called Clover, which
is a test coverage tool so that you can test--you can track the metrics of how well your tests
are actually testing your code. And, Bamboo, which is a continuous integration server for
forming builds. The company is based on Australia. It's been around 2002. But we also have offices
in San Francisco and Amsterdam. And, I work in the San Francisco office as a developer
for about the last 18 months. >> All right. What Google technologies do
you use? >> MOORE: Mostly we're using OpenSocial. So,
we're making a real big push now to take OpenSocial, which has already sort of proven itself as
a social networking technology, and we're using Enterprise because we've decided that
development and really all kinds of business activities are inherently social activities.
So what works well for social networks also works really well for Enterprise applications.
>> Right. What was involved in your decision to use the OpenSocial platform?
>> MOORE: Well, a lot of it is that JIRA, our issue tracking tool, has a configurable
dashboard that can be used to display data about your issues. We thought it would be
even better if we could display data from the other products that we sell, and even
other products that we don't sell, side by side with your issue information. And we look
at iGoogle and saw how that was able to pull content from lots of different developers,
put them all in one place and display that information next to each other and said, "Wouldn't
it be cool if dev tools work this way?" And, you could pull your issues and your source
code activity and code review activity and your builds all into a single unified dashboard.
And when we saw that OpenSocial was based off of Google Gadgets, we thought that this
would be the ideal technology to build our new dashboards off of it. And the more we
thought about it, the more we thought that we could bring in other aspects of OpenSocial
as well because, you know, if you think about a Wiki, it's really kind of a social network,
if you think about source code repository, the different committers to that project are,
in a way, members of a social network. >> Have been there any major challenges that
you've encountered on the platform? >> MOORE: I think the biggest challenge that
we've had is that, a lot of what OpenSocial was built for was websites that have a single
company controlling them with whatever deployment architecture they need. Whereas we sell package
software that's mostly installed by our customers on their own servers behind their firewalls.
And OpenSocial wasn't necessarily designed for that kind of deployment scenario so we
had to find ways to make that work. So, one example was that, a lot of OpenSocial gadgets
have URLs that are hard coded to access data from a certain web service at a certain URL.
Well, we wanted our gadget developers to be able to develop gadgets that can be installed
into any customer's instance of our software and we'll contact back to that software to
get data. So we actually a developed kind of a templating layer that sits on top of
the gadget specification and allows you to embed macros within your gadget spec that
are transformed when you install that gadget into a server, and so, for example, the URL
for that server or the OAT information for that server. And so, it takes a generic gadget
and customizes it for the server that is installed on.
>> How has providing an application with platform helped your business?
>> MOORE: Well, all of our software has been extensible pretty much since it was built.
We have a rich plug-in API for all of our software and we've got a large ecosystem of
developers. Some of them are commercial developers that sell products that work on top of our
software. Some of them are open source developers. And we actually have made a lot of open source
plug-ins available ourselves so that people can use this as a learning tool. So, even
though we're just kind of starting with the OpenSocial stuff, our first OpenSocial implementation
is JIRA 4, which is going into beta this week. We do kind of have a history of providing
an API layer for developers to build on our software, and it's been incredible the innovation
that we've seen, people build on top of our software and even entire businesses that are
based on building plug-ins for JIRA and Confluence. So we're really excited about OpenSocial because
our softwares traditionally had Java APIs, which is great if you're a Java developer.
Many of our customers are not. OpenSocial allows you to build integrations based on
just HTMLs, CSS, JavaScript, simple Web technologies that a lot of people understand. And so, it's
going to open the door to even more extension and integration by a bigger audience of developers.
>> Do you have any advice for developers looking to write OpenSocial apps?
>> MOORE: Well, developers who are writing OpenSocial apps for our platform or gadgets
for our software are--we recommend that they start with simple stuff and it's really a
good idea to get familiar with the gadget technology by writing gadgets for iGoogle,
and then start to learn about how we provided extensions on top of that for our own software.
A great resource that we just launched today is a microsite on our website for OpenSocial,
and especially OpenSocial and the Enterprise. If you go to www.atlassian.com/opensocial,
you can see videos, documentation, links to resources for developers and end users. So
it's a great resource for anybody who's interested in this technology.
>> Very cool. Very cool. So what's the most lucrative OpenSocial container that you've
created? >> MOORE: Well, most of what we've worked
with other than our own containers are Google's containers. We're really excited especially
about the ability to embed gadgets in Gmail. We think that's going to be really useful
for a lot of people who tend to live their lives in email but want to see data from either
Atlassian or other applications juxtaposed with their email and provide an easy way to
interact with a lot of different application without having to leave their page. We're
also obviously really excited as is everybody here about the Google Wave stuff. And we're
really interested in seeing if our gadgets are going to work in that too, we hope so,
and I don't see why not. >> Right. All right, Tim, I want to thank
you for your time today. >> MOORE: Thank you.