Why are there so many different scripting/query languages in use?

[Marcel Hager]

As a new JSM admin I find it absolutely maddening that the scripting environment is so fragmented and there's no real indication of what should be used when, or the fact that some things just don't work together, but there's no documentation that I can find to support that, just silent failures during automation runs.

Why does JQL behave differently than AQL? Why are there even two different languages in the first place instead of just standardizing on JavaScript to be actually useful?

Why is there a difference between .jiraDateTime() and jqlDateTime(), and why do neither of those options format automatically to set a date/time field in an Asset object? Why do I specifically have to set {{now.format("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ")}} for it to update the date/time field on an Asset?

As far as I can tell, none of this is really documented well, or at all in some cases, and the documentation is devoid of actually useable instructions in many cases, and it seems like most posts on the Community are just app developers trying to sell their apps in the Marketplace.

[Christopher Yen]

Hi Marcel,

My guess for all the different languages is that many of the modules within the platform originally started as standalone or third-party apps that Atlassian later acquired. For example, since I started using Jira, both OpsGenie and Assets (formerly Insights), as well as Loom, were brought into the Atlassian ecosystem, I’m sure there were others before that I'm unaware of.

It would be nice to just use SQL or one query language across the board but I have gotten used to it so if it changes it would throw me off and probably break a lot of automations like the ones you're working on now. The basic query builders have been improving so at least for most end users this isn't as big of a problem

The Community does have a lot of marketplace developers promoting their apps especially in use cases where there is no out of the box solution but also has a lot Atlassian customers like myself who are just trying to get the most out of the platform. I know it can be frustrating at times but hang in there, you can still create a lot of good solutions for your users in Jira / JSM

[Jim Knepley - ReleaseTEAM]

Hi @Marcel Hager 

I believe your questions are rhetorical, but I suspect that the answer is that Atlassian didn't originally author parts of their portfolio. They acquire products and, over time, give those products the Atlassian look, and likely integrate them as appropriate with other products. Things that aren't front-and-center to a user seem to be lower priority.

The fragmentation of query and scripting syntaxes is a plague across the IT industry. I've used products with query languages that were so obtuse, I had to have support write queries for me (which sometimes took THEM days).

[Marcel Hager]

I agree with your assessment but feels like they (Atlassian) really should spend more time integrating the products they acquire into their overall ecosystem.

To me the entire cloud platform feels disjointed and thrown together with random apps and features just bolted on, and the answer to most questions in the Community almost always seem to boil down to "Buy this Marketplace app!", which is just yet another layer of "stuff" bolted on to make the product do what it should be doing out of the box already.

Heck, I even got frustrated this week and decided to build my own Forge app to be able to do what I need, and Atlassian's instructions for setting up the dev environment was flawed, and I couldn't successfully set anything up past step 3.

[Tim Pettersen]

Hi @Marcel Hager

Sorry to hear you had a hard time getting Forge set up — could you share a bit more about where you got stuck in the dev onboarding process so we can take a look at improving the docs?

cheers,

Tim

[Marcel Hager]

Hi @Tim Pettersen ,

On this page Build a Jira Service Management hello world app, everything worked as expected until the section "Change the page title". Once there anything I do just throws errors, and in the manifest.yml there is no section for app id and adding it manually throws other errors.

At this time, I'm just going to move on to something else and spend more time trying to better understand JQL and AQL instead of trying to learn Forge as well.

[Tim Pettersen]

Thanks for the additional detail @Marcel Hager

I can't reproduce the issue as described (the template appears to have the ID generated correctly when I try it using Forge CLI v11.3.1). If you do come back to this and have a similar issue, would you mind raising an issue at go.atlassian.com/ECOHELP and share the generated manifest.yml file so we can investigate further?

Otherwise you may be interested in checking out Customizing Jira Service Management with Forge | Atlassian Developer Training as an alternative way to ramp up on Forge. I find sometimes that a video walk through showing the tools in action can be an easier way to ramp up on Forge development than the wall-of-text tutorials.

But in any event, JQL & AQL will be super valuable tools to thoroughly learn for using Jira. JQL in particular underpins a lot of other functionality in Jira, and is a useful utility for building Forge apps as well. So definitely a good idea to learn those thoroughly first :) 

cheers,

Tim