Retool and Jira: A perfect pair

What could make Jira better? Perhaps a way to quickly build and share apps built on Jira data and blended data sources? Everyone I know has built an app wrapper to Jira data with varying degrees of sophistication. Despite what they may have lacked, they all had one thing in common; they were built to remove barriers.

Retool is a recent discovery for me, I've been poking around for a few weeks as I try to solve some data processing challenges, and I like what I'm finding; a quick way to build and present working UIs around klunky datasets, something I used to do frequently in the late 1990s with tools like Lotus Approach and Microsoft Access.

Retool supports a range of Resources for data input. Jira Cloud is supported out of the box, with the full Jira Cloud REST API implemented and available in the tool.

Queries are flexible and powerful, and can be chained and triggered.

Take their output directly into a Component for rendering and presentation, or POST data captured as inputs from selection and input dialogs.

The free plan gets you the basics in the Edit mode as shown above. $10 per user allows you to versioning and releases, a Staging and Production data source, and the option to toggle between an Edit and End-user modes.

Where does this fit in the build vs. buy argument? Is it a framework? A toolkit? An IDE? You could make arguments for each. You can run it on-prem or hosted, and extend the code with your own JavaScript, HTML and CSS, or someone else's, like the CSS from the Atlassian User Interface library. (a topic for Part 2?)

You can even build a Wizard to walk users through a tedious data entry problem. Could this be useful for Scoping requirements? Replacing an Issue Collector?

Has removed barriers for me? I think so and it seems ideal for building bridges in their place.

I have exported the JSON from the Demo app in this article. You can find it here: https://bitbucket.org/wkennedy/a9-retool-demo/src/master/