Documentation for JIRA 4.3. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

How do I get access to manager X?

You can get access to all Managers in JIRA through the Pico container's ComponentManager.

You can inject the component by registering it in your constructor as per PicoContainer and JIRA or you can statically load it from the ComponentManager itself. For example:

IssueLinkTypeManager issueLinkTypeManager = 
 (IssueLinkTypeManager) ComponentManager.getComponentInstanceOfType(IssueLinkTypeManager.class);