Data is sent to and received from the endpoints within Payara Platform. When large chunks of data are sent to the client in response to a request, it might be an option to compress the data when the bandwidth is limited.  This speeds up the transfer, but requires more CPU on the server and the client to perform the compression and handle the response.

With the October 2021 release, the Payara Platform allows configuring the compression level and the compression algorithm so you can better tune your environment for your requirements.

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.

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.

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.

Payara Server comes with the Domain Data Grid, a very powerful feature related to the clustering capabilities of the product. If you're deploying the application on the domain server itself and are not using any clustering options, it's possible to disable the Domain Data Grid to slightly reduce Payara Server's start up time - but should you?

The Domain Data Grid can be disabled but be aware that a few other features in Payara Server also depend on the Domain Data Grid.

Within Payara Server, the JMX system is used to store all the data that the monitoring service captures of the modules within the runtime.

You can use any tool that can connect to the JMX system to collect these data and monitor the environment. Besides this direct access, the notifier service can send this information to various channels so that the data can be integrated with external systems.  

The Notifier service is modular since October 2020 with version 5.2020.5 so that you can include only those notifiers that you are interested in and use within your environment. These notifiers cover a wide range of channels, from typical destinations like email, JMS Queues, over APM tools like DataDog and NewRelic to communication platforms like Teams, Slack, and Discord.

In this blog, we take a look at enabling JMX Monitoring for the JVM Heap Size, monitoring the process Heap Size, and then sending that information to a Discord channel.

We are all familiar with Microsoft Azure, Google's GCP, or Amazon's AWS platform for running applications in a public cloud. But there are also other, lesser-known platforms like Alibaba Cloud.  And while many don't know this platform, it is by far the largest one in the Asia Pacific region and even the third largest cloud provider worldwide. Alibaba Cloud has some interesting features.

In this blog, we explore some aspects of the platform and how it can be used with the Payara Platform.