The next Java Long Term Support (LTS) version, Java 17, has been released.  We thought this would be a good time to give you a short refresher on the Java versioning and why Payara Platform only runs on LTS versions.

Co Authored with Nicolas Frankel (Hazelcast Developer Advocate), this article is also available as a PDF.

The Hazelcast In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) is an efficient method of storing data in a distributed way within the memory of the different processes of the cluster. Because it is distributed, searching the data locally requires 'moving' the data to your instance so it can be accessed, which is not overly efficient.  Hazelcast SQL allows distributed queries which perform the search where the data is, and then transfers only the results to your process. Since the Payara products already use Hazelcast IMDG, using the Hazelcast SQL capabilities is straightforward: just add the additional JAR library to start using it.

With Jakarta Faces, you can build user interfaces for web applications, including UI components, state management, event handing, input validation, page navigation, and support for internationalization and accessibility. It is a server-side framework that allows for rapid development of web applications, mainly administrative applications which are data entry and business logic heavy. The web pages are created by defining the components that are required and the events that are triggered by the user, and the rendering happens in a separate phase that can be customised to your needs.

In this blog, we mention a few features of Jakarta Faces 3.0 as it is one of the largest specifications of Jakarta EE 9.

With the Jakarta Persistence API, the system can perform the serialization of Java Objects into the Database or read data into objects. You can use Jakarta JPA to read and write Java instances easily from and to the database.

With the help of annotations on Java classes and instance variables, the mapping is defined between the Java world and the database world. 

In this blog, we cover some of the basic aspects of the JPA specification and how you can use it.  The specification is rather large so make sure you also consult some documentation and other resources to find out all the capabilities of the specification.

As a proud open-source business, we value the contributions of our community of users - driving the Payara Platform forward and shaping its development. 

Users can suggest and make improvements or bug fixes by issuing a pull request on GitHub. We then reward our contributors with Payara 'swag' - t-shirts, stickers and pens! 

SSL certificates are used for several features within Payara Server. You can configure your custom certificate for the TLS based connections the Payara Server is serving when using a custom domain name. And those certificates can be used for authentication purposes to identify the caller, mainly in a machine to machine communication.

With the July and September 2021 Payara Server releases, we have implemented two new features to improve the usage of these custom SSL certificates.

The September 2021 Payara Platform release is here!  Both Payara Platform Enterprise and Payara Platform Community Editions include a security fix that requires you to take action to ensure the security of your environment. (Explained below).

Payara Platform Enterprise 5.31.0 and Payara Platform Community 5.2021.7 releases each contain 10 bug fixes, 1 component upgrade, 1 security fix and 1 new feature. 

You can download Payara Platform Community 5.2021.7 here and request Payara Platform Enterprise 5.31.0 here. 

Read more below to learn more about the highlights of this release.

Did you know? Payara Services is the proud recipient of a 2021 Queen's Award for Enterprise - International Trade. Often called the "Knighthood for Business", theQueen's Award is the UK's premier business accolade. 

On the back of this achievement, our CEO and Founder Steve Millidge was in high demand as an interviewee. In two recent interviews, you can find out more about what winning this award meant, Payara as a business, more about our open source business model and even Steve's motto! 

One of the Payara Platform features people like most is flexibility for how it can run applications and services and connect them to each other. You can run applications on Payara Server, Payara Micro, and cluster them all together in the same Domain Data Grid, while using the same technology for building the applications and the samefeatures in both Payara Platform runtimes. A lot of our customers take advantage of this flexibility and some even take to the extreme, as described below.

In a recent episode of the Airhacks podcast, host Adam Bien interviewed Payaran Patrik Duditš who is in charge of our Payara Cloud project.

In this webinar, Payara CEO Steve Millidge discusses the August 2021 Roadmap for Payara Platform.

We are now sharing the FINAL video in our'Dismiss the Myths: Get to Know Jakarta EE (Java EE)'. 

This one asks the question: 'Is the Java EE Deployment Model Out of Date?'. We definitely don't think so! 

Steve Millidgeshows you why the Java EE (Jakarta EE) deployment model is not old fashioned or out of date - and goes into battle with Spring!

With the release of the Payara Platform products in August 2021, we have added some additional features when you are using the OpenID Connect option within Payara Platform products.