Coming out of the Payara pond to help cool down your summer, the Payara July 2023 release is out with enhancements and bug fixes. Payara Platform Enterprise 6.4.0 comes with 5 bug fixes, 1 improvement, and 3 component upgrades. Payara Platform Community 6.2023.7 also comes with 5 bug fixes, 3 component upgrades, and 2 improvements. 

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) has become the de facto standard for data interchange in modern web applications. Its simplicity, readability, and compatibility have made it a popular choice for representing structured data. The JSON-P (JSON Processing) API provides a powerful and convenient way to parse, generate, transform, and query JSON data on the Jakarta EE Platform.  In this blog post, we will explore the fundamentals of the JSON-P API, its core functionalities, and how it empowers you to work with JSON effortlessly in your Jakarta EE applications. 

Apache Camel is an open source enterprise integration framework that helps you connect different systems and applications together with as little effort as possible. It provides a simple and powerful way to define and implement message-based routing and mediation rules. It is an implementation of the patterns described in the book Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf.

In simple terms, Apache Camel acts as a "translator" or "bridge" between different systems. It allows you to easily route, transform, and process messages as they move from one system to another. It supports a wide range of communication protocols and data formats (JSON, XML, YAML, etc.), making it easier to integrate different technologies and applications.

Coming at the dawn of summer, the June release of the Payara Platform is out with enhancements and bug fixes. Payara Platform Enterprise 6.3.0 comes with 2 bug fixes, 1 improvement, and 1 component upgrade. Payara Platform Community 6.2023.6 also comes with 2 bug fixes, 1 component upgrade, and 1 improvement. 

Payara 5 Enterprise will also receive a new release: Payara Platform Enterprise 5.52.0, available only to those using Payara Enterprise. If you are still with Payara 5 Community, remember it is discontinued,contact usto find out how you can still receive a supported platform.  

Oracle, together with the Java Community over the last few years, have changed the release cadence of the Platform. With biannual releases, the Java of today is a remarkable departure from Java 8. With all the rapid advancement of the language comes the problem of keeping up as a developer.

Thankfully, Java Champions Marc R. Hoffmann and Cay S. Horstmann came up with the Java Almanac website. JA is a great resource that gives you both a summary and detailed overview of changes on the Java Platform from Java 1.0 to Java 22.

The changes are organised in a tabular format with details, links to the respective API and a helpful comparison page. It also has a download page with options to download from any of the JDK distros. All in all, Java Almanac is a great resource to keep abreast of the new release cadence of the Java Platform. 

Java Records, one of the major highlights of the Java 16 release, provides a concise and immutable way to define classes for modelling data. This conciseness lends itself useful in a typical Jakarta EE application that can have a number of layers that need to share data. For example the data layer might want to return a subset of a given data set to a calling client through a data projection object. The REST layer might want to have separate entities for server and client side among others. This blog post explores the adoption of Java Records in a Jakarta EE application as a data transfer and projection object.

With the team freshly rejuvenated from the annualPayara Retreat,the May release of the Payara Platform is out with enhancements and bug fixes to rejuvenate your deployments. Payara Platform Enterprise 6.2.0 comes with 4 bug fixes, 3 improvements, a security fix and 6 component upgrades. Payara Platform Community 6.2023.5 also comes with 4 bug fixes, 5 component upgrades, 1 security fix and 1 improvement. 

The Lombok project is a Java library that aims at “spicing up your java.” Started back in 2009, it consists mostly of annotations that can be used on Java classes to generate helpful constructs like getters and setters. It aims at freeing you from writing quite a number of the ceremonial boilerplate code that you sometimes need to write as part of your everyday use of Java. 

YAML is a simple, human-friendly data serialization language for all programming languages. It is the main format for working with Docker. As a language agnostic format, there are many bindings for all the major programming languages. You can easily consume and return data in the YAML format in your Jakarta REST application using message body readers and writers.

Oftentimes in a Jakarta REST application, you may need to access some metadata about a given resource method matched by the Jakarta REST runtime, outside of a resource class. This could be so as to dynamically alter the client's request based on some custom business requirement, or for informative purposes. For example, in a Jakarta REST component like an exception mapper, you might want to get the currently matched resource method and get its HTTP method.