Software projects, both large and small, benefit from relying on an issue tracking system to manage and maintain a central and up to date list of project features and bugs. Ticketing systems have become a fundamental component in large eScience projects and advanced computing institutes to keep track of user issues and requests. Projects such as XSEDE and Blue Waters and advanced computing centers such as TACC, use Request Tracker (RT) as a help desk ticketing system for issue tracking.

A shortcoming of RT is its limited ability to customize the user interface for both users submitting tickets and staff monitoring tickets. In order to make the most out of using RT it is crucial to be able to integrate RT into your applications and services. To get the most out of RT we decided to build both a java library that can be easily used in any of your java applications to access your RT instance and be able to create user interfaces for both help desk staff and users. Furthermore, we also built a REST API that can be hosted to allow external applications - such as mobile apps - to be able to easily connect to your RT instance. We will present our experiences and best practices in developing both a Java library and REST API. The presentation will detail how the API was developed and give real-life use cases for how the API is used in various applications.