Symptoms

Users are unable to start or configure JIRA (version 4.3 or later).

Cause

JAVA_HOME is not set to a Sun Java 1.6+ implementation of the JDK.

Resolution

Ensure that you're running JDK version 1.6 (for JIRA until version 5.2) or JDK 1.7 (for later JIRA version greater than 5.2) . Check the JAVA_HOME declaration by running java -version from the command line.