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Comment by ryaniscool | Hacker News Reader

[edit] This is a response to the original unedited comment that claimed he wrote the first version of Confluence

I'm a former Confluence developer (2008-2013). I don't know anything about you or the detailed history of Confluence.

- When I started there were 12 people on the team including me. I wasn't there at the very beginning but some people on that team were and they would discuss design decisions from the start of the project.

- It was a spring-hibernate-webwork Java web application. Very complex and structured. Not your typical weekend project. Mike Cannon-Brookes (co-founder) of Atlassian wrote a book on this type of architecture.[0]

- They were always very open and forthcoming about open source they were leveraging. I don't remember this ever being discussed or mentioned.

[0] https://www.wiley.com/en-ie/Java+Open+Source+Programming:+wi...

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[Edit] To make it clearer I annotated my initial comment because I don't want to mislead people.

[Deleted b/c it was inappropriate]

The wiki engine was called Radeox and rendered wiki markup into HTML. It was written in Java and open sourced from an existing Wiki application called SnipSnap [0]. If you have worked at Atlassian as a developer, you should have seen that name. It was also used as an example by Grails developers, e.G. in "The definitive guide to Grails"

References to it can be e.G. found here:

https://docs.atlassian.com/ConfluenceServer/javadoc/7.12.2/c...

The way macros are done and I have invented can e.G. be found here:

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-t...

I have discussed things with Mike Cannon-Brookes long before you've joined the company. Sadly the oldest mail I can still find from Mike to me is from 2006 and was not about this topic.

[0] https://github.com/thinkberg/snipsnap

In fairness, "Wiki engine" to me made me think Confluence was based off of XWiki or something similar and that you contributed that, rather than a Wiki macro renderer.

Additionally, Confluence being born from it seems like something someone should have the receipts to as well.

Maybe someone can reach out to Mike about it.

Yes you're right, apologies for creating a misunderstanding (see my edit above).

Not sure, it was 20+ years ago, but I might remember XWiki also using my wiki render engine back then, but I could be wrong ;-)

(it could be a reimplementation of the interface)

"The XWiki Syntax 1.0 was supporting Radeox macros."

https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Old%20...

The group of people back then was small.

I've started work on this even before Wikipedia was started, just as a point of reference.

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