It's that time again, our March monthly catch! The "fishes" in our "net" are Java, Jakarta EE, Open Source and Microprofile articles, news stories, videos and podcasts we've found useful and interesting, as well as a few Payara Services updates.

Big news this month is the General Availability release of Java 16. Articles under the 'Java EE' subheading in our Community news section below provide expert opinions on what's new in this release.

Foojay's Virtual JUG tour is in full swing, with the Java community platform organising a succession of online events at JUGs all across the world. 

As contributors to the Foojay platform, supporters from the start and members of itsinaugural advisory board, Payara Services was happy to participate. Rudy de Busscher presented his talk, 'Creating a Kubernetes Operator in Java', for the St. Louis Java User Group as part of the tour.

You can now watch this, and also hear Geertjan Wielenga introduce the concept of Foojay to start the talk.

In our February Monthly Catch,  we’ve rounded up a wide range of the most useful learning materials, community news pieces, videos and podcasts from the world of Java, Jakarta EE and MicroProfile - and of course provided updates from Team Payara!

As we progress into the year, the new releases of Jakarta EE - including the breaking namespace change - and MicroProfile are becoming more embedded and discussed. For example, it was great to see Dalia Shea from JetBrains discuss using the new “jakarta” namespace, and Michael Redlich at InfoQ summarizing the JakartaOne conference where Jakarta EE 9 was officially announced.

We’re also seeing a lot of looking round the corner to what’s next for our community: to JDK 17, as well as the innovations coming through Project Loom and Project Panama.

It also seems to be unofficial survey season! We’ve launched our own, Omnifaces have published its survey’s fascinating results looking into JakartaEE and MicroProfile, and you still have time to answer questions forthe Snyk and Azul survey that came out this month. It’s exciting to see so many opportunities for people to feedback, drive and shape the future of Enterprise Java and its associated technologies.

If you enjoy the content, make sure to follow us on our Twitter and LinkedIn, for the very latest news as it comes in. 

Enjoy!

In what’s been a strange start to the year, a silver lining is the growth of innovative communities, with people pushing themselves to build something valuable together - making use of a time when the majority of us are in lockdown. At Payara Services, this has taken the form of an uptake in contributors to the Payara Platform open source project - and it’s time to say a huge thank you! 

The Payara Platform Community versions are open source runtimes for development projects and containerized Jakarta EE and MicroProfile. This means we welcome contributions through GitHub from developers looking to shape the future of Enterprise Java - whether to Payara Server Community, supporting Jakarta EE in any environment; or Payara Micro Community, which is lightweight to suit containerized Jakarta EE deployments.

Since our end of year Contributor shout-out, we’ve seen some fantastic pull requests on our GitHub, that have since been incorporated into this latest February release. 

Payara Services team members have worked with Payara Platform users to create the very best innovations, leading to mutual learning and development - and most importantly, ensuring that Payara Platform remains innovative, creative and agile. 

It's time for the first Monthly Catch of the Year! We round up January's best content covering Java, Jakarta EE and MicroProfile - including tutorials, news stories, videos and podcasts. 

In the first month of 2021, many trusted experts made their predictions about what the year will look like for Enterprise Java. We’ve listed some of our favourites below, including the Payara team's own predictions. 

Make sure you watch our2021 Roadmap Webinar to find out how the big topics like OpenJDK 17 and the adoption of MicroProfile 4.0 will play out for the Payara Platform specifically, and shape our plans as a company over the next year. 

One hot-button that kept recurring in 2021 outlooks and in blogs was Project Loom. This incubation project is predicted to transform the way that multithreading works in Java, and has really generated a buzz this month, with several articles explaining and speculating on what the innovation, still in an experimental phase, will look like.  Will virtual threads make concurrency easier on the JVM? 

To keep up to date on what Java / Jakarta EE topics are causing a conversation, follow us on ourTwitter!

Payara is pleased to announce that we have joined the MicroProfile Working Group. This builds on our commitment to shaping and improving Enterprise Java for both microservices and monolithic architectures. 

The MicroProfile project was born as a community initiative to optimise Enterprise Java with a microservices standard platform. It joined theEclipse Foundation in 2017, an independent open source software association, with the goal of driving innovation with a vendor-neutral "incubation" environment.

The Eclipse Foundation's MicroProfile Working Group encourages collaboration between participants, working in short cycles to propose and gain approval for new common APIs and functionality - and in turn drawing on the knowledge of a wide variety of different vendors. As one of the contributors, Payara engineers will shape and drive the future of the MicroProfile specifications.

We talked to our Founder and CEO Steve Millidge to find out more about what this means. 

Kubernetes is much more than a runtime platform for Docker containers. Through its API you can not only create custom clients, but you can also extend Kubernetes. Those custom Controllers are called Operators and work with application-specific custom resource definitions.

In December, the biggest news was Jakarta EE 9’s official release, completing the move to the jakarta namespace. This officially took place at the Eclipse Foundation Jakarta One Livestream, where our CEO Steve Millidge took part in the keynote speech (watch here) and presented as lead on the GlassFish project (video here). 

In other major release news, MicroProfile 4.0 was made available towards the end of the month, with the delayed release set to bring in new features including alignment with Jakarta EE 8. 

Payara has also enjoyed kick-starting healthy debate this month, with our CEO Steve Millidge proposing that Ahead of Time Compilation with GraalVM isn’t always all it’s cracked up to - and watching the comments roll in!  

We are hoping to continue to make bold statements and drive forward discussion in the Java and Jakarta EE community in 2021. 

If this sparks your interest, make sure you are following us on Twitter!

As leading contributors to the Jakarta EE project, Payara excitedly welcomes Jakarta EE 9 - now officially released! 

Announced at today’s Jakarta One Livestream, the headline breaking change is the move from the package namespace javax to jakarta across the Jakarta EE 9 Platform, Web Profile specifications, and related TCKS. 

Through our involvement in the Eclipse Foundation Jakarta EE Working Group, we are proud to play a major role in shaping, improving and championing Jakarta EE 9. The specifications will be key to the evolution of cloud native technologies for Java, also central to Payara's mission. 

Writing microservices within Jakarta EE is technically possible, but you miss a few goodies for the distributed environment you are running in.

MicroProfile wants to optimize your Enterprise Java application by creating Java standards which link to some well known CloudNative standards like etcd for Configuration, OpenTracing and Jaeger for Distributed Tracing and Prometheus for Metrics.

In this talk, delivered by Payara's Rudy De Busscher at EclipseCon, he goes over some basic concepts of the MicroProfile specifications and show you through various demos how the integration with those tools can be done easily.