Symptoms

We had this happen.

1. Customer started up JIRA under Turkish locale. JIRA does not work under Turkish locale.
2. We told customer to start JIRA with "-Duser.language=en -Duser.country=US -Dfile.encoding=UTF8"
3. Customer then gets:

java.lang.NullPointerException
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
	at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
	at com.atlassian.plugin.osgi.bridge.external.HostComponentFactoryBean$DynamicServiceInvocationHandler.invoke(HostComponentFactoryBean.java:150)
	at $Proxy106.getIssue(Unknown Source)
	at com.pyxis.greenhopper.jira.util.collector.SummaryIssueStatsCollector.saveIssue(SummaryIssueStatsCollector.java:46)

Workaround.

Delete your $JIRA_HOME/plugins/.bundled-plugins and $JIRA_HOME/plugins/.osgi-plugins directories and then restart JIRA under the correct locale.

Detailed Problem.

The problem is that the .transformed-plugins/jira-greenhopper-plugin-5.2_1283493059000.jar has been created under the Turkish locale. It has an entry

  <beans:bean id="ıssueFactory" class="com.atlassian.plugin.osgi.bridge.external.HostComponentFactoryBean">
    <beans:property name="filter" value="(&amp;(bean-name=ıssueFactory)(plugins-host=true))"/>
    <beans:property name="interfaces">
      <beans:list>
        <beans:value>com.atlassian.jira.issue.IssueFactory</beans:value>
      </beans:list>
    </beans:property>
  </beans:bean>

Notice the special Turkish character "ı" in "ıssueFactory". This is generated from "IssueFactory".toLowerCase("tr", "TR"). Unfortunately when we started up JIRA under en_US the proxy (DynamicServiceInvocationHandler) around the IssueFactory in the Greenhopper plugin continued to look for an "ıssueFactory" but under the en_US locale it is registered under the "issueFactory" name. This causes the proxy to throw a NPE because it never finds the host service.

Resource: http://www.mattryall.net/blog/2009/02/the-infamous-turkish-locale-bug