My Confluence 3.0 Wishlist

Confluence 2.9 was released last month and I've seen references to 2.10 in the Confluence issue tracker, so I expect to see it out in 1-2 months. That makes me think about what's next.

As a part of my adventures of working on Sun's external wiki wikis.sun.com, I've been working on Confluence plugins and even the Confluence core code for a year and a half now, adding new features, enhancing the existing features and very often fixing bugs. Sometimes it was trivial to enhance the code or fix a bug, other times it was not, but what I want to write about today are things that were not possible at all without irreversibly forking the code.

Confluence 3.0 should be a version that really deserves to have the first digit incremented. Not because marketing said it's time for that, but because the changes in the application are so significant.

I'm sure that Atlassian has lots of ideas about what Confluence 3.0 should look like, but Atlassian guys, in case you start to run out of ideas, here is my wish list:

Fix the Database Schema

Confluence has been in development for years and the database schema definitely shows that. Since the database is the heart of the application, I think it deserves a lot of attention and major performance boost could be gained by doing a clean up.

Specific improvements:

• Establish and in the future enforce naming conventions
• Replace all the natural foreign keys with surrogate keys, e.g. user name, spacekey, group name should be replaced with ids in all the referencing tables (this would finally allow CONF-4063 to be implemented)
• Add caches for the lower function (patch) and maybe counter caches

Rework the Clustering

Clustering is usually supposed to fulfill two functions: scalability and robustness. In the case of Confluence mainly the second attribute is missing. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that a Confluence cluster is less robust than a single instance of Confluence. Why? Because the way it is implemented makes the entire cluster vulnerable when one node has problems.

I personally experienced several cluster lock-ups or crashes, usually initiated by a separate Confluence bug, in which the effect was multiplied by the clustering code. One of such of these bugs: CONF-12319

Mike's presentation covers quite a few design goals behind the implementation in Confluence. Clustering can really get ugly and complicated and Mike covered it pretty well. Unfortunately the distributed share part of the clustering makes Confluence prone to problems.

One of the clustering goals that Mike emphasizes in his presentation is that clustering should be "admin-friendly" (low admin overhead and easy setup). While I agree with the low overhead part, the easiness of setup should not compromise the goals which clustering is trying to fulfill in the first place. Clustering is for people who are serious about running Confluence, and as such should be expected to be qualified for the job.

Specific improvements:

• Either reevaluate the distributed share clustering so that it is super robust, or consider implementing clustering via a centralized share
• Avoid shutting down the entire cluster when "cluster panic" is detected. A better solution, which avoids unnecessary downtime, would be to shut down all the nodes, except for the nodes properly clustered with the oldest node.

Clean Up the HTML and CSS Code

The html code that comes out of Confluence is horrendous. While the rendered output looks pretty pleasant, looking under the hood (browsing the source code in a browser) is not recommended for pregnant women, men with ED, high cholesterol, and generally not recommended for people over 50.

Some improvements were done in this area in the recent releases, but all of them were just minor cosmetic surgeries. Confluence really needs major surgery that will bring the html code up to current standards. The benefit of this will be much faster page loads and code that is easier to maintain and enhance.

Specific improvements:

• Rewrite most of the templates and macros to make them XHTML 1.0 compliant
• Minify and combine javascript and css files (CONF-8622)
• Use image sprites to even further speed up page loads (especially in the rich text editor)

Redo the URI Namespace

Human friendly URIs and URLs are becoming more and more important on today's Internet. Confluence is not doing well in this area.

Specific improvements:

• /display/MySpace/My+Page - is the /display part really necessary? Can't we do /MySpace/My+Page
• /pages/diffpages.action?pageId=2490471&originalId=45714293 - What is this? I don't know. How about: /MyWiki/My+Page/diff/23:22. I think that actually means something. There might be a better format, this is just a thought.
• I think in general redoing the URI name space using REST conventions would be interesting.

Improve Atlassian-Renderer

When I was creating come patches for the atlassian-renderer I was surprised to find that atlassian-render, the module responsible for rendering wiki markup into html is full of hardcoded html snippets. The main reason why this surprised me is that most of the Confluence code is pluggable, which allows for parts of the code to be replaced with a better version without a lot of problem. This is not the case with the render. And this presents two problems: it's not possible get Confluence to directly render anything else than html (pdf and doc are only derived from the html), and it's not possible to use anything else than Confluence markup as the input for the renderer.

The first problem makes me unable to render custom output like docbook or to improve the PDF output, which is pretty poor.

The second issue means that all the customers that use Confluence are locked-in because all the content created via Confluence is Confluence-specific and can't be easily moved to a different wiki engine when needed.

In my opinion the sooner all major wiki engine developers settle on one wiki markup standard the sooner we will all be better off. This might be especially difficult for Atlassian to swallow and implement, because they standardized on their own markup that they also use in their other products.

An interesting initiative that is gaining a lot of traction is Creole, a standardized wiki markup. Confluence is one of the few major wiki players that doesn't support this initiative.

Specific improvement:

• Split the current renderer into two pluggable parts: parser and renderer
• Implement Creole support (CONF-12077)

Improve Developer Documentation

spent countless hours, especially in the beginnings trying to figure out how Confluence works and how Confluence plugins should be written. I learned some new tricks and that's the good part, the bad thing is that the experience could have been much better if the the code contained more javadocs comments and if the plugin interfaces and mainly the configuration file format was better documented.

Specific improvements:

• Add JavaDoc comments where missing
• Finally provide complete specification and documentation for the plugin config file (JRA-12183)

Thanks! :-)

That's about as much as I can think of for now. There are probably other things that I missed and then there enhancements around security, which I know are already on the roadmap.

I understand that most of the changes above will create incompatibilities with many existing themes and plugins, but hey, Confluence 3 will happen only once EVAR and releases like this are expected to bring major incompatibilities. Data can always be migrated automatically and existing plugins and themes will be migrated when there are people interested in using them and proper migration instructions are provided.

I hope that Confluence 3 will not be a "marketing" release, but instead something really cool that all users and developers will enjoy working with.