[Rt-devel] RE: RT - Java connection

[Craig Gallen]

Hi,

I have also been looking for a good way to connect a java (J2EE) application
to RT and came across two potentially promising options;

1. The REST interface - which looks like it implements similar commands to
the CLI interface but uses HTTP POST commands
2. The SOAP interface - which has been used for integrating with the open
source Asterisk PBX. I   heard this was in the process of being updated -
but saw no more about it.

Obviously the REST and SOAP interfaces would be better as they could be used
from a remote JAVA application without having to use native calls to the CLI
or Perl code.

Unfortunately having searched intently, I found that neither interface is
documented and it's quite hard to work out what they do or how to use them
from the code. Ideally I don't want to have to learn all of the internals of
RT before I can use an API. They are not mentioned in the new  O Reilly RT
Essentials book. So I to was wondering whether there was a strategic
commitment to keeping these interfaces current in RT and where I could go to
get a run down ( examples?) on how to use them. 

Thanks
Craig
University of Southampton


-----Original Message-----
date: Wed, 07 Sep 2005 12:11:40 -0500
From: Tuvik Beker <Tuvik at Soligence.com>
Subject: [Rt-devel] RT - Java connection
To: rt-users at lists.bestpractical.com, rt-devel at lists.bestpractical.com
Message-ID: <1126113100.27983.151.camel at localhost>
Content-Type: text/plain

Hi,

We are currently looking into RT and would like to connect it to a
web-application written in Java. The idea is to maintain full RT
functionality as a standalone ticketing system, but also be able to query RT
and manipulate tickets from our own Java-based web interface. 

We considered three options for connecting the two applications: 1. Direct
calls to Perl methods 2. SQL interface (our application already communicates
with MySQL) 3. Using RT's command-line interface (CLI)

Java-Perl interfaces seem to be rather poor and cumbersome, unlike the
pretty good C/C++-Perl connectors out there, so we'll probably skip option
1. Between the other two, it seemed the CLI should offer a more consistent
interface, less prone to future changes than internal database table
structure. Is that a valid assumption?

There was one particular problem we came across with the CLI - we didn't
find a way to search and/or alter custom fields from the command line. I
read all the documentation I could find and searched the mailing lists, but
most of the stuff I found was pretty outdated. Can someone enlighten me on
the status of that issue in the current release?

Thanks in advance for any inputs,
  Tuvik


Tuvik Beker
Soligence Corporation