JIRA anyone?

dubstep · February 28, 2012, 6:02pm

I’m trying to evaluate what use I can make of JIRA with Rails/Ruby and
am
getting frustrated.

The jira4r gem will install but the soap4r gem won’t load.

literally: ‘irb -r soap4r’ returns :cannot load such file…

I also set this up in a Gemfile and tried to run this from the rails
console:
/Users/TAllison/projects/cs_jira/vendor/cache/ruby/1.9.1/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/xsd/charset.rb:13:
warning: variable $KCODE is no longer effective
/Users/TAllison/projects/cs_jira/vendor/cache/ruby/1.9.1/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/xsd/iconvcharset.rb:9:in
<top (required)>': iconv will be deprecated in the future, use String#encode instead. /Users/TAllison/projects/cs_jira/vendor/cache/ruby/1.9.1/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/xsd/xmlparser.rb:74:in<top (required)>’: XML processor module not found. (RuntimeError)
from
/Users/TAllison/projects/cs_jira/vendor/cache/ruby/1.9.1/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/parser.rb:9:in
`require’

I can’t any updates to this since ~2010. Which leads me to believe that
this entire set of libraries is just a bunch of dead wood.
Software isn’t updated.
No traffic on the mailing lists.

So my next question is – does anyone use JIRA API with Ruby/Rails and
if
so – how?
I’m really surprised at the complete lack of mention in the last 2 years
and am wondering if I made a mistake picking Jira up as a potential
solution for my business.

Any experiences?

tma · February 29, 2012, 2:57pm

Tom A. wrote in post #1049289:

So my next question is – does anyone use JIRA API with Ruby/Rails and
if
so – how?

I’m guessing, not very many. I attend the Ruby user’s group whenever I
can. I’ve not seen or heard of anyone using JIRA with Rails. Most prefer
a more “agile” project management tool such as PivotalTracker,
Lighthouse or similar. Each of these have REST based APIs and are often
integrated with Rails.

I’m really surprised at the complete lack of mention in the last 2 years
and am wondering if I made a mistake picking Jira up as a potential
solution for my business.

I’m not surprised about this. JIRA is an “Enterprisy” project management
tool. While Ruby on Rails is perhaps gaining some ground in the
enterprise space it’s not something necessarily driven by the core
Rubyists.

Rails is well known to be an “opinionated” framework. And SOAP lost that
battle years ago to REST. So I’m not surprised to see little mention, or
support, of a SOAP based API no matter what’s sitting on the other side
of it.

I’m not saying that your choice of JIRA was a mistake. I’ve not
evaluated the software, mostly because my first glance at it didn’t
appeal me. And, finding out now that its API is based on SOAP just
lowered my interest even further.

I did evaluate a lot of project management/tracking solutions and found
only one that I was actually happy with, which is PivotalTracker. That’s
not to say it’s the solution for everyone though.

As for helping you with your soap4r/JIRA integration problem. I’m not
surprised your having trouble, but I have no idea how to help you with
that. I do wish you luck in fining a solution.

tma · February 29, 2012, 3:26pm

Greenhopper is a Jira plugin for Scrum teams - Pivotal Tracker, Rally
and others get better reviews from users I have heard from.

Where I work we do a lot of Jira automation using the SOAP listener,
both with ruby and java - I have used jira4r (I posted a gemspec for
it on the Atlassian site if I am remembering correctly) - I think the
error you are getting means you do not have a supported XML processor
installed …

All the gem does is if I remember correctly is store the session key
returned from login in an instance variable and then add that
parameter to every outgoing request that is made - it is pretty tiny
code-wise.

Max

tma · March 2, 2012, 12:28pm

Thanks all for the feedback. Good information! Now a few comments on
where I am today:

Jira 5.0 does have some nice REST API features that I’m working with.
Not
sure it has everything I need but it seems that previous versions are a
little light on REST support. Currently stuck in the cloud and trying
to
figure out how to get to a version 5.0 sooner.

JIRA was not exactly my choice - it was given to me as an Enterprisy
solution.
I’m also not using it as an Agile development tool at all. I’m using it
as
the basis for a Customer Service software platform. Not sure that it’s
the
best option in the world, but it is the option on my plate today. I am
interested to hear of any others people have experience with - I’m all
for
“better”.

I think there is a lot that needs to be extended to meet my needs. I
just
hope I can get there with this set of tools.

tma · March 1, 2012, 1:45pm

Hi Tom,

I work for Atlassian and have been using the following:

https://github.com/trineo/jira-ruby/

Recently updated, built against JIRA 5.0 REST API, and maintained by an
Atlassian Expert.

Cheers,
Nick

On Tuesday, 28 February 2012 09:01:14 UTC-8, Tom wrote: