What are Atlassian's plans about CSE / Client-side extensions?

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I have noticed that Atlassian has published, back in 2021, a set of “Client-side extensions” (CSE) libraries, tutorials, documentations, not particularly tied to the Bitbucket documentation. They seem awesome:

Questions:

  • Did Atlassian publicly report plans about making CSE broadly available for all products?
  • If so, what is the status of adoption?
  • Can we use CSE in Confluence?
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Hi @aragot,

Thanks for the message! As one of the authors of CSE, I appreciate your feedback :slight_smile:

  • Did Atlassian publicly report plans about making CSE broadly available for all products?
  • If so, what is the status of adoption?

Unfortunately, I don’t think the Atlassian DC products are committed to adopting the CSE broadly in all products. So far, only the Bitbucket DC has native extension points in the UI you can extend: Discovering Extension Points - Client-side Extensions

Can we use CSE in Confluence?

Technically, as far as I’m aware, you could use CSE since the CSE runtime module is integrated into the product. At the same time, the Confluence DC, compared to Bitbucket DC, never introduced any native extension points in the UI.

You could create your custom extension points in your plugin and use them.

However, there is not much point in using CSE if there are no native plugin extension points in the product UI.

Thanks,
Maciej Adamczak
Atlassian Developer

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I had a rush to get a bunch of plugins converted to CSE and after having done so, and after having built apps on CSE and taught others to do so, I can say easily say “I love CSE and wish it was in all DC products”.

The barrier to entry is simply lower and the performance of the client side UI is vastly superior. I, and SpaceX in general, wish the product owners of the DC products could see the value in continuing to invest in the DC tools.

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Thank you very much for rushing to CDAC to answer, Maciej! I hope it’s a 20% which will convert into full-fledged adoption! However, as an aside note, it’s so hard as external developers to ensure that we have the full stack aligned, that deploying front-end code is a bit flimsy cross-products at this time. Who knows, maybe the ease of use of your CSE will make it broadly accepted.

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