These days, it seems Kubernetes is a topic that is never too far from people's lips.  The tool, and the associated tools built around it, are talked about so often it seems it's the only subject important to developers these days - especially as the IT world becomes increasingly orientated towards cloud and microservices.

But in spite of all the conversation around Kubernetes... do you really need Kubernetes for your environment? Or is it just another case of the next 'new and shiny' object,  with people distracted by the novelty and possibility, rather than the facts? In this blog, I'll take a closer look at why Kubernetes might be a case of the hype outweighing the helpfulness in most cases. 

Running your application sometimes requires multiple instances to handle the requests of the users. Within the Payara Platform, the Domain Data Grid helps you configure your environment to run your application in a cluster. Besides the setup of a cluster itself, many applications can benefit from an environment that scales dynamically.

The number of instances must increase when the application usage peaks and should decrease when activity is low to reduce the resource usage and the corresponding costs associated with it. The introduction of the AutoScale feature in Payara Server Community 5.2021.4  helps us achieve this dynamic scalability.

Earlier this week, Jakarta EE 9.1 was released. This is an update to Jakarta EE 9, adding support for JDK 11 - you can read more about it in our bloghere.

Alongside the Jakarta EE 9.1 release, GlassFish 6.1 has been released as a Compatible Implementation. 

However, although GlassFish is still used by many - a legacy of the time it was supported by Oracle - we would argue it is NOT a good choice for running your enterprise applications in production.

If you are considering updating to more recent GlassFish versions, it might be better to consider more reliable, supported, and up-to-date alternatives. In this blog, I explain why GlassFish 6.x is not the best choice for your mission critical deployments.

In this series about getting started with Jakarta EE 9, we look at various specifications and how you can use them for your next application. In the previous blogs of this series, we set up our development environment and had a closer look at implementing REST endpoints.

This time, I will explain a few features of Context and Dependency Injection (CDI). The CDI specification is an important backbone of Jakarta EE as it brings several specifications together. Over the years, it became more and more important as an increasing number of specifications started using CDI as the basis for it.

In this blog, I will tell a bit about the different scopes, the interceptor mechanism, and the Event system.

The HTTP Strict-Transport-Security response header (often abbreviated as HSTS) tells the browser that it should access the website only using HTTPS, instead of using HTTP.

The May 2021 releases of the Payara Platform, Community version 5.2021.3 and Enterprise version 5.28.0, allow you to configure the HSTS header.

In this blog, we show you how to start your next Jakarta EE application with Visual Studio Code  using the plugin for the Payara Server.

We will create a Maven project so that you can also build it outside the IDE, such as in your CI environment, so you can automate your deployments.

When a user needs to access multiple applications in your environment, you should not require authentication for each application. If the user has already been authenticated for one of the applications, he or she should  should not be asked for credentials when he accesses one of the other applications during the same browser session. This concept is called Single Sign-on where the authentication credentials are 'shared' in the environment and can be used by any application in that environment.

When a user needs to access multiple applications in your environment, you should not require authentication for each application. If the user has already been authenticated for one of the applications, he or she should  should not be asked for credentials when he accesses one of the other applications during the same browser session. This concept is called Single Sign-on where the authentication credentials are 'shared' in the environment and can be used by any application in that environment.

In this second blog of the "Getting Started with Jakarta EE 9" series, we show you some basic Jakarta REST API usage scenarios. Most people are using the term REST or RESTful API just to indicate they do data transfer over HTTP, ignoring the "Hypermedia as the engine of application State (HATEOS)" part of REST.

The technology is used a lot lately to connect the front-end with the back-end. For Jakarta EE 10, read our Getting Started with Jakarta EE 10 blog. 

The Domain Data Grid feature of the Payara products is powered by the Hazelcast library. It provides the necessary functionality for the Deployment Group (clustering functionality), Cache functionality, CDI cluster singleton, and monitoring data storage within Payara to name just a few features.

Since Hazelcast can cluster multiple instances into a data grid, it is possible to create a Hazelcast grid that comprises the Payara instances and some other instances included in other applications running outside of Payara.