Hi, Craig, First of all, thanks for raising this question, and my apologies for taking this long to come back to it. You asked an important question about CloudBees’ position and thoughts, so we needed to talk among ourselves for me to get to this answer. And this isn’t as easy as we want for a big distributed company like us. I will start by saying that CloudBees is 100% behind Jenkins. And we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk. In 2018, our people worked on a lot of different areas of Jenkins, ranging from Configuration as Code, “cloud native” improvements, security fixes, Jenkins X, Evergreen, and the list goes on. So how does that translate to Blue Ocean?
Blue Ocean accomplished many things. It created a great excitement, it made many Jenkins users’ lives far better, and it paved the way for driving other significant projects that transform Jenkins, such as Jenkins X. At the same time, I think it hasn’t yet attained the “escape velocity” of community collaboration like core did a decade ago. There are multiple reasons for that. Partly, it’s because of the JavaScript SPA skill set requirement that are not readily available within the Jenkins community. Also, more importantly, it hasn’t attained the sufficient level of extensibility, which made it difficult for plugin developers to contribute productively. The team took on some serious efforts to tackle this challenge, and you can see them on some branches and JEPs, but it’s a truly unique problem, and we haven’t cracked that egg yet. So Blue Ocean is kind of at a crossroad — It needs to tackle some hard problems before it can attain the true parity with the classic UI, but our initial attempt at that didn’t pan out. In the meantime, what’s happening is that we’ve been focusing on other major efforts around Jenkins. Many of those I already mentioned above and elsewhere <https://jenkins.io/blog/2018/08/31/shifting-gears/>, which all require significant brain juice and time. And those big ticket items all have major impact on UI. For example, with Cloud Native Jenkins as a distributed software, how do we need to put together the UI in that world? If CasC is very successful, maybe we can let that take the place of the system configuration UI. As those efforts were going out first, Blue Ocean was left in a reactive mode. The bottom line is, as it stands right now, CloudBees haven’t yet come to “the CloudBees’ plan” on Blue Ocean. Different people, myself included, have various thoughts, but they still need to come together to form one coherent plan. The key leader in this process is Jenn Briden <[email protected]>. She is the product manager that is responsible for this area. In authoring this response I talked with her, she has thoughts, and she is willing to talk to people if anyone have thoughts and opinions. She is interested in working with you and she’ll reach out to you, and I suggest others with thoughts to send her an email, while we work on how she can more proactively engage in the community. For the time being, CloudBees is doing what it can to fix regressions, bugs, and doing the necessary maintenance to retain the same level of functionalities as the rest of Jenkins evolves. Many of the people who have worked on Blue Ocean are still around, such as Keith, Nicu, Josh, Ivan, et al. And what you saw is them holding the fort. I will do my part to ensure Jenn to get the necessary organizational support to engage in the community and form a plan, and to have that communicated well when that happens. Or if somebody else is willing to step up and carry the torch forward, I’d love that, too. And I recognize this problem applies more broadly. As the pace of innovation accelerates, it’s good that our thoughts and thinking continue to evolve on key efforts to incorporate more thoughts and polish ideas, but it needs to come hand in hand with better communication and engagement, and we fell short on the area, as this thread highlights. We had some leadership changes, including James’ departure, and that didn’t help either. That’s something I’m well aware of, and me and others having been working on it. That’s the honest answer I can provide at the moment, as CTO of CloudBees. On Wednesday, December 12, 2018 at 12:30:10 PM UTC-8, Craig Rodrigues wrote: > > Hi, > > When BlueOcean was originally being developed, James Dumay, > who was a Director, Product Management at Cloudbees > was very active in leading Blue Ocean, and communicating status and > milestones with the Jenkins community. > > Since James has left Cloudbees, what I have observed is: > > 1. No one at the manager/director level is visible on the > https://gitter.im/jenkinsci/blueocean-plugin Gitter channel to > communicate with users or get feedback > 2. Many bugs filed against Blue Ocean in JIRA are unassigned > 3. Cloudbees employees who log into > https://gitter.im/jenkinsci/blueocean-plugin seem to be doing so as a > best-effort/volunteer level. For example, on Nov. 16, Keith Zantow > reported: > > > *Keith Zantow @kzantow Nov 16 06:36 @rodrigc hard to say exactly what's in > the road map at this moment, but certainly open to patches* > > Can someone in Cloudbees management comment on the company's commitment to > Blue Ocean? > > I try to do what I can. I've submitted one bugfix: > https://github.com/jenkinsci/blueocean-plugin/pull/1794 > > And submitted a few bug reports: > https://bit.ly/2B8MmmQ > > Blue Ocean is very good, but needs some bugfixes and usability > fixes to meet parity with the Jenkins Classic UI. > Blue Ocean is some complicated "modern JavaScript", and I don't > have enough time to dig into it to fix the problems myself. > > I am trying to push Blue Ocean and Pipeline very heavily at the companies > I work for, and for the most part everyone I talk to really likes Blue > Ocean, > but the bugs/gaps are a problem for wider adoption/success in the projects > I work on. > > Thanks for any feedback. > > -- > Craig > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jenkins Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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