Creating a XML-RPC Client — In this tutorial, we write a basic XML-RPC client (using Apache XML-RPC http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/index.html) that logs in, retrieves projects and then log out again. A Python client is also demonstrated.
Adding your own email handling classes — In JIRA, emails may be periodically fetched (eg. via POP or IMAP) and processed (eg. create a new issue, create a comment). You can add new ways of processing emails by implementing the MessageHandler interface in JIRA (or subclassing one if its implementations).