The Jazz Integration Architecture

The Jazz Integration Architecture (JIA) enables diverse tools to be used together providing an integrated experience to their users. JIA is a set of inter-connected technologies and specifications, not another monolithic platform. JIA consists of a reference architecture, API specifications, a set of common services and tool building blocks. It enables the building and quick integration of new tools.

At the center of JIA is the Jazz Team Server (JTS). The JTS provides foundational services - Jazz Foundation Services (JFS) - that enable groups of tools to work together. These services include user and project administration, security, collaboration, query, and other generic cross-tool capabilities. When installed, tools are associated and work in conjunction with a particular JTS.

Powering much of JIA are standard RESTful APIs and standard resource definitions which enable participating tools to easily share data. JIA also includes reusable building blocks that speed the development of new project and the adoption of existing tools. Finally, it includes specifications that enable better integration of, and navigation between, the user interfaces of the various tools.

RESTful web services

In order to make its data and services available to the widest possible range of clients, a tool exposes its data and services through a resource-oriented Web service. The intent of the Web service is to provide a stable long-term programmatic web-based API for directly accessing the facilities and data offered by the tool. These web services use an arrangement of URIs, HTTP methods, and standard representation languages such as XML and JSON, that work like the rest of the Web. The protocol is stateless; client state is carried in the client; server state is explicitly reflected in the resources.

A REST API provides three key things: stable URLs for the tool data resources; documented representations for those data resources; and a protocol and operations for manipulating those data resources based on standard HTTP methods. Providing URLs for the tool data resources enables these resources to be linked from anywhere. In effect, the data resources become "hyper-data," just like hypertext enables fully connected, flexible content such as text or images.