Introduction

We have seen various ways to enhance the JIRA functionality in the previous chapters, but how do we communicate with JIRA from another application? What are the various methods of integrating third-party applications with JIRA? Or in simple words, how does JIRA expose its functionalities to the outside world?

JIRA exposes its functionalities via REST, SOAP, or XML/RPC interfaces. Only a handful of the full JIRA functionality is exposed via these interfaces but JIRA also lets us extend these interfaces. In this chapter, we will learn how to communicate with JIRA using these interfaces and add more methods into these interfaces by developing plugins. The focus of this chapter is more on SOAP with examples for other interfaces as well. The core principle for all the interfaces is the same.

There are quite a lot of methods in SOAP, most of which can be understood well from the API at http://docs.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/api/rpc-jira-plugin/latest/com/atlassian/jira/rpc/soap...