Allow for external applications to authenticate against OnDemand (Crowd)

JIRA Studio is great! One of the most complete and purposeful software development environments available as a SAAS solution. I say 'most complete' as some vital elements of a development environment are still missing. The most important elements are:

• Maven Artifact Repository (Nexus)
• Sonar Instance for QA analysis
• WebDAV storage for arbitrary sized files (test data etc. exceeding 10Mb)
• Maven Generated Site Storage

Expecting Atlassian to include said elements into their Studio offering anytime soon would be unrealistic as they have no control over the source code and, in the case of Nexus, would actually be competing with Sonatype.

Luckily the web is a 'distributed' environment and hosting a separate Linux box running Apache-Nexus-Sonar-WebDAV is fairly trivial and not very expensive. The question is however, how to integrate these tools with Studio? Well, what kind of integration would be required? Data stored in these applications will not be accessed by Studio in any way. So it's not the type of integration between, for instance, SVN and FishEye which is a tight integration with lots of traffic/communication from SVN to FishEye. (one of the reasons why supporting external SVN repositories is 'expensive' in terms of performance and bandwidth). Not the case here! So really the only thing required is Single Sign On (SSO) or at least the ability to externally authenticate users in Studio.

Using Crowd this would be trivial. Set up an 'external generic application', specify a password and select one or more groups that are allowed access. Then all it would take is making users member of said groups and they could access the external apps using their Studio accounts. And having these apps authenticate against Crowd is trivial as well. Both Sonar and Nexus have a Crowd plugin and the Apache-crowd module allows Apache to call Crowd as well for Web/WebDAV access.

Assuming that Studio uses Crowd to do authentication/authorization (which would make sense) it shouldn't be hard to achieve this. Even when Atlassian won't allow direct customer access to the Crowd instance for reasons of security it would technically be possible. In that case an Atlassian support engineer could setup an 'external application' upon request and allow access based upon membership of the group specified in the support request.

Even if we would have to pay extra for each of these support requests this would increase the usability of Studio tremendously. After all, after setting up an external app the app-group-mapping would be static. So we're talking about a custom support request similar to installing a custom plugin.

To summarize: allowing for custom support requests to setup external apps with a static group-mapping would extend the usability of Studio beyond the provided functionality without any technical impact or custom code. 'A free lunch' for Atlassian, or, if they would charge per external app, 'a paid lunch'. In any case, there wouldn't be any reason anymore not to use Studio!!!

Regards,