Hi everyone! I’m starting a discussion thread here on the Atlassian Developer Community in case anyone wants to discuss our recent update about Atlassian Connect on our blog: https://blog.developer.atlassian.com/forging-ahead-with-atlassian-connect/
I’m eager to chat with anyone who has questions, concerns or wants to know more!
@HeyJoe Thanks for letting us know about upcoming changes to Atlassian Connect.
As a partner/vendor I’m very much interested in a roadmap of features, and the support of these features in the official Atlassian Connect libraries (ACE and Spring Boot).
This is great to hear, and we are looking forward to more details on the unification project.
Hi, I tried Forge and at the End I found your link and details. So it was a waste of time.
If you are looking to build a new app or integration for Atlassian cloud products (especially a commercial one), we recommend that you build with Connect . Connect is a stable, secure and feature-complete framework – and we’re going to keep it that way. We are continuing to enhance Connect to address key gaps in functionality compared to server apps and add enterprise-ready features. There will always be a need for apps that access data and compute resources outside of the Atlassian cloud, and this core capability will always be part of our app development experience.
If you are looking to customize an Atlassian product to help your team or to tinker with what’s possible (especially if you are interested in custom Jira automations or Confluence macros) , we encourage you try out Forge. It’s easy to get started and prove out your idea without having to worry about hosting, authentication and security requirements.
To be honest this is like selling candies to children after selling Whiskey before. We developed Atlassian Server Apps before and are now forced to focus on Cloud App development based on stupid decisions.
Hi @david - long time no see! 
It has been a while, and we’re very close to being at a point where we can share detail. There will be an opportunity to get hands-on with combined Forge/Connect functionality at the upcoming Dev Day on November 10th 2020 as part of our “Team Tour” event - Home: Atlassian Team Tour 2020 - Digital Experience
We’ll be launching an alpha version of this functionality that allows you to declare both Forge modules and Connect modules in a single app manifest, and we’re continuing to work on a pathway for existing Connect apps to update their marketplace listings to support this model.
Until then, I’m happy to talk generally about our plans if you have specific questions.
Hi @HeikoGerlach - I’m glad you were able to find this discussion thread, but I’m sorry to hear that your evaluation of Forge felt like a waste of time. As a former server plugin developer myself, I truly appreciate that the move to Cloud apps can feel like a bit of a shock. Forge is still in beta, so I encourage you to not discount it completely yet, as we still have a lot of work to do and plenty of features in our roadmap. Trello
I am happy to discuss further if you need guidance on how you should approach app development in the cloud, or if you’d like to offer feedback on what’s missing in order to fulfil your requirements. Thanks for engaging with us in the developer community.