@nathanwaters, as @dmitrii said this is great feedback for us. The whole Forge product team have been sharing and discussing your thread this week. I’ll have a go at colating an overall response and others might chip in on specific points.
DX
- With regard to the use of various NPM packages, we know this can be frustrating and have started a project to fundamentally re-think how the Forge runtime works. We want to allow more flexibility while also staying true to the Forge trust model. It’s a big piece of work but should hopefully bring some big improvements to the platform in the second half of 2022.
- The same work should also bring a bunch of overall stability and performance improvements (including the Tunnel).
- Multi-user app ownership and support for CI/CD are known gaps in the Forge offering and road mapped for later 2022.
- Observability is also something we’re also working on and you’ll see that continue to improve throughout this year. Did you know that you can also view your logs in the developer console? We’d be keen to hear any more specifics you have on the types of logs you need and how you’d prefer to access them.
- With regard to cost, our position is still the same. We plan to keep Forge as free as we can. Its primary purpose is to improve Atlassian products and create value for our customers.
Storage
As you pointed out, we recently increased the limits but we know there’s still more to be done. I see you’ve already given @sushantBista some more feedback on that so thank you.
UI Kit
UI Kit exists so that developers can quickly and easily build front ends that Atlassian customers find intuitive and familiar. There is a deliberate bias toward simplicity over flexibility.
That said, we know there are lots of cases where an extra level of control would be helpful and we may evolve UI Kit to allow for that in future. You raise some fair points around the current quirks and issues and we’ll keep those in mind. Every bit of feedback helps shape our vision for the future of UI Kit.
At the moment we’re more focused on closing some of the feature gaps in Custom UI but are committed to improving UI Kit in the long term. Stay tuned.
MacroConfig
We know that the options for MacroConfig are extremely limited at the moment and it’s a blocker for many of our popular Confluence apps moving over to Forge. Custom UI for MacroConfig is one of Forge’s top voted feature requests.
I don’t have any specific updates to share on this at the moment but know that it’s high on our priorities.
Deployment
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I’d love to hear more about how you think we might best support your mono repo set-up. With regard to the 20 manifest files - are you suggesting you might prefer a single manifest that applies to multiple Forge apps in a single repo? Being able to lint individual and deploy multiple apps easily from the same repo is a fair ask and something for us to think about.
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With regard to the permissions changes, I appreciate that was painful and apologise for how messy that was. We’ve taken some good learnings from that rollout and are doing everything we can to make sure something similar doesn’t happen in the future.
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The problem with the developer’s name being displayed on marcos is currently being worked on should be fixed this month.
Summary
Thanks again for taking the time to give us such in-depth feedback. We appreciate a good rant Most of these challenges will take time will take time to solve but they are top-of-mind for us and you’ll see some big improvements over the course of the year.