Is the source distribution needed to make a call to the JIRA API?

[Yuanyuan Zhou]

I have a question about api call. Can you guys tell me do I need the source distribution to call an api or the standalone version on windows for JIRA is more than enough?

[sohail]

Whether the SOAP API or writing plugins, you don't need the source distribution.

However, I've found the source useful on occassion. See this blog post for why you might find it useful.

[Yuanyuan Zhou]

Thx, bro. And further, can you tell me how to load jars to call the existed apis? I don't know where is the definition file of those apis on the official documentation. I am not quite familiar with jar call.

[sohail]

Well, if you are making a SOAP client (running outside of JIRA), then you don't need any jars except the ones necessary for the ones that you use for your client. This is a Java thing and beyond the scope of this question, I think.

If you are running inside JIRA (see "writing plugins" link), then the SDK will take care of using the right jars for you.

[Yuanyuan Zhou]

so how do you know the names of the ones necessary? You dont know the file name containing the functions you wanna call?

[Colin Goudie]

If you are just wanting to connect to JIRA remotely via another application (web or otherwise) you could also just use the REST APIs. These are what Atlassian will be concentrating on moving forward.

http://docs.atlassian.com/jira/REST/latest/

I don't think the SOAP APIs will be maintained as much as the REST APIs

[sohail]

Very good point!

[Ashley Russell]

the standalone edition is fine. if however you are using the atlassian plugin development thingy, then be aware the xmlrpc is NOT included. what we ended up doing was copying the plugin from our main server out of it and into the sdk to use it, massive pain

[Penny Wyatt (On Leave to July 2021)]

Hi Yuanyuan, I've just updated the title to include more information - so other people can more easily find the answer to this question in the future.

[Colin Goudie]

The only thing you really need is the Atlassian SDK. http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEVNET/Installing+the+Atlassian+Plugin+SDK This includes the required tools such as maven etc.. That you will need. As Sohail said though, if you have a license, the source is invaluable at times.

[Yuanyuan Zhou]

Yeah. I tried to figure this out this morning, but I don't understand if I wanna build a web application which calls jira's api, should I build this application as a plugin using atlassian plugin sdk?

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

If your web-application is running in another VM it has no need or use for Jira classes. You will be accessing Jira remotely through an API, your client code is whatever you need to make that work, whether its a SOAP stub, or jason object builders/parsers. So Colin is right, you dont need the code, but it is _darned_ handy to understand _how_ things work.