Stable and core APIs

So, we are in to coding. If you are familiar with JIRA plugin development or have been using them prior to JIRA 5, one thing you might have noticed is that there are quite a few versions of every plugin out there! There are not many plugin versions that work on all JIRA versions. You might also know the reason behind this: JIRA has been evolving a lot in terms of its APIs.

With JIRA 5, Atlassian has introduced stable and core APIs, and with great interest, the development community read the following blog written by Rich Manalang: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/03/stable-apis-yes-we-have-them/

The earlier atlassian-jira dependency, which was used in JIRA plugins prior to JIRA 5, is now replaced by two different dependencies: jira-api and jira-core. jira-api (aka the stable API) is a set of classes or interfaces that will not be changed without prior notice. Atlassian will maintain binary compatibility for these classes and interfaces.

jira-core, on the other hand,...