Its been some time since I have worked on Jira. Creating plugins and modifying Java/Velocity Template/jsp code was what I used to do earlier. It was fun earlier when you start of learning new things and understand the structure of the excellent code written for Jira. But then the work becomes monotonous and you feel that you have more to give. After having finished with Enthiosys but developing some high end stuff based on SVG, javascript and HTML, I was asked to do some work on Jira.
The idea is a simple one. try to build something that would let users chat about some Jira issue and then log the chat into the Jira issue as comments. :) . Simple as it sounds, I had to set up a Jabber server. I used the excellent OpenFire as the server. The LDAP credentials for the company, I managed to obtain and then configured it so that all the users of the company could log in. Jira 3.13.4 was downloaded and I managed to connect to LDAP as well with the help of Indraneel.
Then came the difficult part. The application which was to be in AIR. I first thought to try to build it using flash. Actionscripting is something that I could do. But to have frames build movie clips is something that I could not do. I was good with HTML and Javascript and thought I would do it my way using HTML Ajax. I decided to build the required files to communicate with Jira and Jabber in flash so that I could use them in HTML using the window.runtime object provided by Adobe AIR.
Jira offers 2 ways of external communication. SOAP and XML RPC. I downloaded a bunch of those classes which facilitated the SOAP communication, because SOAP was well documented and XML RPC was crude, but did not have much luck getting information from Jira. The envelope and the structure of the xml was not being detected by the class for some reason. I had success with XML RPC and decided to go on with that.
The communication with Jabber was done with the excellent XIFF library. It is one of the best libraries that I have seen but is a little less in documentation. That is ok as long as it has all the necessary stuff required to develop.
I tried compiling the libraries into swf files, but for some reason they were not included in the file. I had just used an import statement. Ashish suggested to use a function and after using a function which initiated the class, I managed to get all the libraries for access. Event listeners were something that needed to be taken care of. At first the idea was to call Javascript from the Actionscript but the sand box had restrictions. This made me create event handlers in javascript and attach then using javascript. That worked fine.
With all the things setup, the next step was to build the interface. The interface would be simple with a list of contacts, an option to search, find and add contacts and chat with a contact. To create a native window with the chat was the next big step. I managed to populate the list of contacts with online and offline contacts (this list would change as and when the user logs in).
The native window creation according to the chat was tricky. It was tricky because to show the window was not a big deal, but to load chats in it was a pretty big deal. The handle for the window must be maitained by the main window and the chats must be sent as well. As of now I am working on this and I hope Ill make progress.
