In Payara Server 5 we have introduced the concept of a Deployment Group - in this blog post, we'll explore why they are important and what they are used for.

We are very excited about the upcoming release of Payara Platform 5! With the new Data Grid, MicroProfile 1.2 support and incorporation of the Java EE 8 reference implementations it is shaping up to be a great release. 

With the release imminent, I thought now is a good time to let people know about some of the changes taking place in Payara Release Streams and Development, and how this affects both customers and users of the community version of Payara.

There have been a lot of really great updates coming out of the EE4J project recently and as far as I can see, the project is progressing nicely given the size and complexity of the undertaking.

In Payara Server 5 we will be introducing some major changes to the way clustering is working by creating the Domain Data Grid (see documentation for more info). The Domain Data Grid will be easier to use, more scalable, more flexible and ideally suited for cloud environments and cloud-native architectures. All Payara Server instances will join a single domain-wide data grid for sharing of in-memory data like web sessions, JCache, SSO and Stateful EJBs. 

As we are at the start of a New Year and it is traditional to gather your thoughts and put in place New Year resolutions and plans, I thought I would share with our Community and Customers the plans for Payara in 2018.

Back in June we announced MicroProfile with RedHat, IBM, Tomitribe, LJC and SouJava and Microprofile.io was launched as a location for community collaboration on Enterprise Java Microservices. In the announcement each of the vendors promised to have a MicroProfile runtime ready and available in time for JavaOne. Well  after much beavering away here in the Payara Engineering team we have just pushed onto Maven Central our 1.0 release of Payara MicroProfile.

The new Java Magazine is out now, featuring a lot of useful articles about enterprise Java - not so much Java EE as a platform, but individual services that can be useful as part of a larger solution. See below for an introduction to my article on Custom Servlet Authentication Using JASPIC, also featured in the magazine. 

If you've read my interview with JAXenter, you already know  that I very much disagree with labelling Java EE as heavyweight - simply because it is not true! The latest servers from most of the Java EE vendors have been re-architected to be very light-weight on resources including memory, cpu and disc footprint. We recently did some testing of microservices implementations and many of those come in at under 50MB of RAM to run Java EE based microservices. Also, installation and configuration has been streamlined and many of the microservices versions of the products require no installation.

Once you have developed applications on Payara Server and moved these applications into a production environment, control will pass over to your Operations Teams. This guide will introduce some features of Payara Server that you may not know about, which are especially useful for the operations teams.

Recently I attended as a speaker at my second jDays, a great conference in a great venue in Gothenburg. jDays is a fantastic conference as it is small enough to easily meet people and network and discuss tech, while at the same time big enough to run multiple tracks so there is always a session on that you’ll be interested in.