In this recent post to her blog, Lorna Mitchell shows how to use the Jira REST API (provided as a part of some of the newer versions of the tool) to create a "dashboard" of the latest items added to the tracker.

Today what you get is an example of integrating with JIRA's REST API, because their recent "upgrade" locked me out of the issue listings pages completely and I really do need to be able to see a list of bugs! Their bug editing screen is quite usable, so it's just the list that I need here, but you could easily call their other API methods as you need to. These examples are PHP and use the Joind.in Jira tracker), parsing the JSON results and displaying the results as a simple list, looping with a foreach and outputting some HTML.