Since being introduced in the 163 release, the Request Tracing Service has allowed you to see which requests are taking a long time. However, this service will only tell you about requests once they have completed. If a thread is stuck and unable to complete you will not know about it. To resolve that problem, we added the Stuck Threads HealthCheck to Payara Server, which checks for requests that have not finished and outputs their stack trace.

As previously reported on this blog, the Request Tracing Service was improved drastically in release 4.1.1.171 and implemented the configuration of a historic trace record storing for increased productivity purposes. In addition to these changes, we also made the configuration on the Request Tracing Service in Payara Micro for the same release. These changes to Payara Micro make it simpler to configure the Request Tracing Service when starting a new instance!

Just a little over a year ago, the MicroProfile initiative was born. The community first heard about it at the DevNation conference in San Francisco on the 27th June last year. During the keynote panel, the five founding members (Red Hat, IBM, Tomitribe, LJC, and Payara) announced their collaboration and their main goal - to make it easier for developers to use familiar Java EE technologies and APIs for building microservice applications.

We're excited to announce that the first Alpha release of Payara Server 5 is now available for download! We highly encourage you to give it a go, test it out and let us know what further improvements are needed. 

The Payara Micro 173 release had a few changes which will make the lives of Docker users easier. This blog will cover the changes which affect Payara Micro in Docker,  demonstrating the following:

• Using the new Payara Micro 5 Docker image, which provides Java EE 8 features.

• Deploying applications without the targetted database being present.

• Adding library JARs from the command line.