Jira exposes many of its features through a set of REST APIs, allowing other applications to interact with it. With these APIs, you can perform operations such as searching, creating, and deleting issues. In fact, several of the apps used throughout this book make use of these REST APIs to perform their functions.

Being a web-based standard, Jira's REST API allows you to use any technology with it. This means that you can write the code in Java, .NET, JavaScript, or even simple bash scripts.

In this recipe, we will be using the RESTClient Firefox add-on to run a search query against Jira to get a list of issues assigned to the currently logged in user. There are many other tools you can use, such as cURL and Postman for Chrome.