Jelly is a scripting and templating language from Apache's Jakarta project. It is similar to Ant, in that scripts are XML, and each tag maps to a Java class, but has a more sophisticated internal pipeline model for tag interaction, much like JSP taglibs. See the Jelly website for more details.

JIRA comes with a number of Jelly tags implementing core operations in JIRA. This provides a scriptable interface to JIRA. There are many possible uses for JIRA Jelly tags, the most common being importing data into JIRA from other systems, and automating common administrative tasks (see the examples below).