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Introducing Space Marketplace Beta
We’ve built Space to be a highly customizable tool for any software development team, and applications are a crucial part of this extensibility. This is why we’re adding a Marketplace for Space apps, which is now in Beta!
We’ve prepared a few applications to showcase what is possible with Space HTTP API, but we believe that the key to true customization lies within you – the community. Your ingenuity, your use cases, and your workflows are what can help expand Space’s functionality beyond its initial form. The Marketplace is where you can create your own applications, share them with other Space users, and use those created by other people.
To kick things off, here are two apps our team has created that you can use right away:
Read on to learn more about Space apps, how to create your own apps, and get an overview of the apps already available on Marketplace.
What are Space applications?
A Space application is an external server-side service or client-side application (JavaScript, mobile, or desktop) that can interact with Space modules. An application can:
- Get information from Space, e.g. list commits in a repository or members in a team.
- Perform actions in Space, e.g. send chat messages or create To-Do items.
- React to events received from Space, e.g. perform a custom action when a commit occurs in a particular repository.
Read this article to learn more about the app features supported by Space.
How to build applications for Space
We’d like to invite you to the upcoming “How to build applications for Space” webinar on August 11 with Denis Zakharov and Maarten Balliauw, who will take you through the application development process step by step.
However, you can already start building apps using the app development documentation and tutorials. Read this article to learn how to distribute your apps via JetBrains Marketplace.
If you love developing and would like the chance to win prizes, enter our Space Apps Contest, create an application for Space, and upload it to our Marketplace.
Expand your Space with available apps
The Space team created a batch of applications that are already available for you. Let’s have a quick overview of what they are useful for and how to install them.
Enable Slack link previews
Whenever you send a link in a chat, Space provides a preview of its contents, giving all participants a brief glance at what’s inside without being pulled away from their current task. Previews are available as long as a link has basic metainformation accessible to anyone on the internet, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and most other web pages.
But what if the linked app or service requires authentication, like Slack, Figma, Jira, YouTrack, and so on? That’s where applications like Slack link previews come into play, connecting your Space instance to Slack to provide a two-way link preview. That’s right: not only will you get link previews for Slack in Space, but you’ll also be able to preview Space issues and code reviews in Slack.
This is especially helpful when some of your teammates (or external collaborators) are using Slack for communication. Another great thing about this link preview is that it actually shows you some of the message, as seen in the screenshot below. This message contains a link to the Space Code Review task, meaning you can go directly to reviewing and approving the Pull Request, all without having to leave your Space interface.
Feel free to take a look at the code itself and use this detailed guide to learn how to create an app like that using Kotlin.
The Space team is also working on the Figma Link Previews and YouTrack Link Previews apps, which add the same functionality, allowing for a quick preview of what’s inside a Figma project or a YouTrack issue, respectively.
Synchronize your Space and Slack channels
To minimize context-switching even further, our next app creates a seamless two-way connection between designated channels – one in Space, one in Slack. This again is very useful for cross-platform teams or for collaborating with external users, as it duplicates messages between channels as if everyone were using the same app, including thread replies, mentions, etc.
The code and detailed description are available on our GitHub as well.
How to install Space apps
Apps can be installed either directly from your Space web or desktop client, or by browsing JetBrains Marketplace. In the client, find the Extensions tab on the left-hand navigation panel and go to the Marketplace submenu.
If the tab is not visible for you, click on “…” right under your profile picture. From there, just click Install on the app you need and follow the steps to grant it the required permissions.
We’re looking forward to hearing what you think about these Space apps, how you think they can be improved, and most importantly, what other Space apps you’d like to have and use in your team. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!
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