JIRA Issues Google Gadget

It's been a while since my last post. You may have been wondering what I've been up to. Well, I was busy spending my free time developing my first Google Gadget.

I must say that the Google Gadgets documentation, especially the Developer Guide are well written and easy to follow. Development itself was a smooth ride. The only hiccup I had on the way was at the beginning when I realized that my gadget was being cached and I had to figure out hot to switch caching off.

Have I read the docs from the beginning, I would have discovered the Developer Gadget (developer.xml) that let's you control gadget caching.

I work with JIRA on a daily basis. I work with it in order to keep track of issues: bugs / tasks / new features. I also work on it - meaning the source code of JIRA as I am one of the developers on JIRA team at Atlassian.

Last week on Thursday and Friday we had out traditional Fedex days. We were let loose to develop anything we wanted. There were no boundaries for creativity. For the results (useful and/or cool stuff) see our developer blog.

I decided to create a gadget that would display limited number of JIRA issues. So I finally got to finish JIRA Issues Gadget 1.0 as well as develop the Add To Google JIRA plugin that would allow integration as painless as possible. I already blogged about it at Atlassian Developer blog.

Google Gadgets can take user preferences and persist them. My idea was to pass these in the "Add To Google" link in order to allow JIRA users to place JIRA Issues gadget on Google Homepage pre-set with current search filter in JIRA.

But them I hit the wall. Passing user preferences in the "Add To Google" link was not implemented yet.

Anyway, I managed to ease the pain a bit. With Add To Google (JIRA plugin) you won't be able to add Google Gadget with one-click operation, but you will have the URL you can copy and paste into the user preferences of the gadget.

At 4pm on Friday all Atlassian developers presented their hot creations to each other.

For more information read JIRA Issues Gadget page. Add To Google plugin source code can be found at Atlassian's public SVN.

BTW: If you want to work on JIRA or other Atlassian products, let us know. We are hiring.