Building upon Tom's great work on Server Sent Events (SSE) both Cliff and Tom worked on making the all the screens in Blue Ocean update without manual refreshes.

SSE is a great technology choice for new web apps as it only pushes out events to the client when things have changed on the server. That means there’s a lot less traffic going between your browser and the Jenkins server when compared to the continuous AJAX polling method that has been typical of Jenkins in the past.

Keith has been working with Vivek to drive out a new set of extension points that allow us to build a new rest reporting UI in Blue Ocean. Today this works for JUnit test reports but can be easily extended to work with other kinds of reports.

Thorsten and Josh have been hard at work breaking down the log into steps and making the live log tailing follow the pipeline execution - which we’ve lovingly nicknamed the “karaoke mode”

Tom has been on allowing users to trigger jobs from Blue Ocean, which is one less reason to go back to the Classic UI :)

Many of you have asked us questions about how you can try Blue Ocean today and have resorted to building the plugin yourself or running our Docker image.

We wanted to make the process of trying Blue Ocean in its unfinished state by publishing the plugin to the experimental update center - it’s available today!

So what is the Experimental Update Center? It is a mechanism for the Jenkins developer community to share early previews of new plugins with the broader user community. Plugins in this update center are experimental and we strongly advise not running them on production or Jenkins systems that you rely on for your work.

That means any plugin in this update center could eat your Jenkins data, cause slowdowns, degrade security or have their behavior change at no notice.

You can learn how to activate the experimental update center on this post.

Stay tuned for more updates!