All apps of the Atlassian Marketplace have a public story, a refined listing with well-organized feature lists. However, behind each, there is a personal narrative, a history marked by code remarks, late-night commits, and embarrassing replies. This isn’t the public story of our ASiC Viewer for Jira Data Center. This is the private one.
It’s the lightning-fast refactoring, the endless iterations to turn a thought into an idea, shape it into something the Marketplace will accept, and get a new product ready to launch within weeks.
June 3, 2025: Genesis and First taste of Reality
The original commit of asicviewer-1.0.0 was pure invention. It was straightforward: the SimpleEdocValidationServlet to conduct the analysis, the JiraAttachmentProvider to retrieve the files and a handful of JavaScript and CSS files to make it a living UI. It worked. It was alive. And in my mind, it felt almost ready.
I was wrong. Real-world pressures hit on the very same day the foundation was laid. The initial code had been built with a Jira Server mindset, but the market was already demanding Data Center compatibility. That meant a frantic, almost desperate sequence of commits—not adding shiny new features, but just fighting for survival. Changes flooded into pom.xml and atlassian-plugin.xml, while I wrestled dependencies into place.
On the same day, the artifact was already renamed, security logic in the servlet was tightened and the metadata about the version was patched. This was by no means a peaceful launching, but a rush to reach the high standard of the Marketplace, with the very first push.
The Mid-June Grind: Bugs, Compatibility, and Finding an Identity
- June 16: There was a commit with the title “Compatibility fix in JiraAttachmentProvider”. It may seem easy or even obvious, but it was the outcome of the realization that an API call that performed well with our test server did not work the same with a different version of a Jira DC used by another customer. Later that day we committed fixes to our core data models, EdocContainer, SignatureInfo, after realizing that there were some edge cases where we were slightly off in our validation logic. We also provided support of dark themes through the use of CSS, which is a strong indication by the user community in the regard to modern UI requirements. It was a necessity that resulted in version 1.0.1.
- June 20: Minor, yet important modification: a new logo was made. The first branding was not the right one; it did not have a identity. The commit message “Switched logo asset” was a reminder that an app isn’t just code, it’s a product.
The Marketplace Gauntlet: June 25th
It was the day when we really got to know what it is to be a Marketplace vendor. When our submission delivered some feedback it took us directly back to the code. This was not about new features being added in to the app to make it exciting, it was about technical and security requirement to be an approved app.
The commit log on that day describes a tale of tireless iteration:
- DC compatibility: updates to pom, atlassian-plugin.xml, README.
- DC compatibility (servlet and provider): code changes…
- Compiled 1.0.3 and Marketplace issues…
- incremented to 1.0.4 with pom and atlassian-plugin.xml tweaks…
The iterations were not to please our users, but to please the gatekeepers. It was a tough but priceless experience that forced me to polish every part of the app, right down to the pom.xml vendor info and the security posture of the SimpleEdocValidationServlet. The files that I have touched most during that time, specifically JiraAttachmentProvider and SimpleEdocValidationServlet, got to be the true hotspots of the codebase, beaten out by the flames of the review process.
The Scars are the Features
Going by the Git history, the actual history of the ASiC Viewer is not the original idea. It’s about resilience. It is about the hundreds of small, micro-improvements a bug fix in a DTO, a compatibility flag in a descriptor, a security patch in a servlet. It is also about hearing feedback, whether it is bug report of a user, a shifting platform requirement, the e-mail reply of a polite but firm rejection of the Marketplace team.
This experience, written in our commit log, is what formed the end product – ASiC Viewer for Jira Data Center.