[wadenick]

Thanks for the reply mentioning us! There’s quite a few independent developers selling their add-ons in our Atlassian Marketplace with yearly bookings of anywhere from a few thousand $$ to over $1,000,000 in some cases. Some have even been acquired by larger partners who double down on investment and now what started as a solo thing is effectively a big startup. We think it really makes sense and is a great option for developers to consider.

Here’s a couple of examples we wrote up: Atlassian Marketplace developer Wittified, a successful solo dev business, acquired recently by AppFire https://www.atlassian.com/customers/wittified. Atlassian customer Twilio, who use several add-ons from such developers and they talk about how it really makes their Atlassian products more valuable https://www.atlassian.com/customers/twilio-case-study.

There’s Bob Swift Software, a long-standing solo independent developer who started with us years ago and who has tens of thousands of customers, also acquired by AppFire. Theres’s our Marketplace developer eazyBI, a reporting tool started as a side-project by one person and now a profitable company with 7 employees. There’s even agile planning features now part of JIRA Software itself, which started as an add-on known as Greenhopper from an independent developer that we ourselves acquired some years ago. And these are just some of the smaller, solo and indie devs. The larger business that emerged on our platform are something to behold (one recently just took a $31M VC round!).

As the person at Atlassian who helped manage and grow this developer platform, I’m really proud of what the developers around us in our ecosystem have built - both their products and their businesses. The successful growth of sales and customers they’ve made in a few short years is extraordinary to watch and to be a small part of. If anything this post I wrote in 2013 is more true now than ever http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/04/the-future-is-bright-for-.... If you’re interested in talking with some of these developers in our ecosystem, let me know and I’ll get you introduced.

[wadenick]

Something I totally forgot to mention, which was remiss of me, is that the platform I'm talking about is also where developers who have their own product - SaaS or otherwise - can also distribute free integrations to our products. Loads of them do that and successfully bolster their own value within any joint customers we share a bit more too.

[edwinnathaniel]

I remember last year I was going to start playing around with Atlassian JIRA API because of the massive installation my employer has (hosted internally, today's version: JIRA v6.3.11) and the experience was like an uphill battle.

If I want to get started again, where would you suggest me to look? I believe one should start with basic JIRA knowledge to understand the fundamental of the software/system/service before they continue to tackle the API (I believe most people, except Managers, use JIRA as told without knowing some fundamental idea behind it).

[wadenick]

So you're going to develop something for JIRA Server (internally hosted software). You'll be using Plugins2*

1. Start here https://developer.atlassian.com/jiradev/getting-started/gett...

2. Install the SDK (it has some pre-reqs) and build Hello World https://developer.atlassian.com/docs/getting-started/set-up-...

3. Bone up on Plugins2 a bit more https://developer.atlassian.com/jiradev/jira-platform/buildi...

4. API Reference https://developer.atlassian.com/jiradev/jira-apis (I recommend the REST APIs + Webhooks wherever possible).

I'm really keen to talk with you about your experience going through that - there's a lot of history and we're aware we need to clean up the journey.

_* If you were developing for JIRA Cloud you'd be using Atlassian Connect.

[wadenick]

Also note you're on an old version of JIRA so check that you're reading the related version of the API references.

[edwinnathaniel]

So Plugins2 and Connect are different?

Like there's no one JIRA API via REST or something?

Thanks for the reply and the links. Really appreciate it!

[wadenick]

Sorry I'm late here. Yes those are different, given the differences between the software running in the cloud and running on customers' own servers.

[rmanalan]

I'd start at https://developer.atlassian.com/static/connect/docs/latest/i....

[wadenick]

This developer is asking about developing for JIRA Server though, so I pointed them straight at that content. Connect is great for JIRA Cloud.