Blue Ocean Dev Log: January Week #4

Published on 2017-01-27 by Michael Neale

As we get closer to Blue Ocean 1.0, which is planned for the end of March, I have started highlighting some of the good stuff that has been going on. This week was 10 steps forward, and about 1.5 backwards…​

There were two releases this week, b19 and b20. Unfortunately, b20 had to be released shortly after b19 hit the Update Center as an incompatible API change in a 3rd party plugin was discovered.

Regardless, the latest b20 has a lot of important improvements, and some very nice new features.

Creating a Pipeline in Blue Ocean

  • A first cut of the "Create Pipeline" UX, seen above, allowing you to create Git based Multibranch Pipelines like you have never seen before.

  • Handling network disconnections from the browser to server (eg server restart, network etc) gracefully with a nice UI.

  • More precise time information for steps and running Pipelines.

  • More information when a Pipeline is blocked on infrastructure, such as when the Pipeline is waiting for an agent to become available.

  • Fixed a really embarrassing typo (a prize if you spot it).

  • Test reports now include stdout and stderr

  • Better support for parallel visualisation, such as when a parallel step exists outside of a stage.

  • The Visual Editor also had another release, with the "sheets" visual component and better validation.

Creation

Currently this is hidden behind a feature toggle, to access append ?blueCreate to the URL in you browser, and then press the "New Pipeline" button. Currently it lets you quickly create a Pipeline from Git, add credentials, etc, in a very nice UX. More SCM types are being added to support this.

Reconnect/disconnect

Lost connection

As Blue Ocean is a very "live" style of UX, if your network becomes unavailable, or the server is restarted, it is good to know in case you were staring at the screen waiting for something to happen (don’t you have anything better to do??). When this happens, now you get a polite message, and then when the connection is restored, even if you are waiting for a Pipeline run to finish, it will then notice this, and refresh things for you:

Reconnected

Note the opacity changes to make it clear even if you don’t see the little message. Very nice addition for those of us who work on a train far to often.

Up next

What is up next:

  • SCM Api changes should land, making things much better for users of GitHub, Bitbucket, and many more.

  • Creating Pipelines from GitHub (including automatic discovery).

  • Lots of fixes and enhancements in the Pipeline from all over the place

  • More ATH [1] coverage against regressions

  • More Visual Editor releases as Declarative Pipeline reaches version 1.0

  • Improvements to i18n

There was also a couple of "alternative beta" releases in the "Experimental Update Center" to help test the new SCM API improvements for better use of GitHub APIs (based on this branch) I do not recommend trying this branch unless you know what you are doing, as this will migrate some data, but help testing it would be appreciated!

Enjoy!

If you’re interested in helping to make Blue Ocean a great user experience for Jenkins, please join the Blue Ocean development team on Gitter!

1. Acceptance Test Harness
About the Author
Michael Neale

Michael is a CD enthusiast with a interest in User Experience. He is a co-founder of CloudBees and a long time OSS developer, and can often be found lurking around the jenkins-dev mailing list or #jenkins on irc (same nick as twitter name). Before CloudBees he worked at Red Hat.