The second release of 2016 is finally here! Payara Server 4.1.1.162 is our biggest release yet in terms of sheer number of bug fixes and new features. One of the biggest things isn't actually a new feature of Payara Server but a newly rehosted documentation, and it's where you'll find the full release notes for this version. 

Taking an environment from development through to production is often an afterthought and can all too often be too far down the list of priorities. Initially, there may not be any obvious problems or issues with manually configuring a new production environment to match an existing one in development or test. As some customers I have visited have found, however, this will only lead to bigger and bigger inconsistency between platforms with ad-hoc changes causing different environments to diverge.

 

Of course, as responsible developers, we all thoroughly test our code and therefore our applications never need troubleshooting; it's everyone else's code that goes wrong.

 

So what do we do when the inevitable happens?

 

Opening our new Payara Updates video series, Mike Croft (@croft) - Payara Support Engineer – gives an overview of the Payara Server 161 Release Notes, highlighting a couple of great community contributions to this release. Mike also mentions some of our plans for the future update videos, so tune in if you want to find out more!

 

Microservices are the latest new-but-not-really-new thing that developers are talking about, and the Java EE world is no exception. In this Devoxx 2015 talk, Mike is using some new features of Payara Server that bring the power of Hazelcast to Java EE microservices, while still keeping the overall footprint incredibly low.

 

 

 

November 2015 saw another sold out Devoxx, this year themed around the 20th anniversary of Java. Despite a theme looking to the past, there were a lot of talks around things coming to Java in the future, particularly with Java 9 and project Jigsaw

 

This is a preview of a personal project I've been working on which I'm sharing (through Payara) with the community, hence it's not exactly polished and there's still plenty more I'd like to do with it - although I could probably say that about most of the things I
work on in my spare time.

Testing is a big part of development; projects would likely fall apart at first implementation without any testing. Because of this, some of you may be wondering if the Payara team have a formal testing procedure, and what it is.