Community Features Added to Stability Stream in Payara Platform 5.201 Release

The first release of the Payara Platform in 2020 syncs the Stability and Community streams.  For those not in the know, the Community stream is what we call our quarterly public releases, and the Stability stream is what we call our monthly bug fix-only releases for those with the supported version of Payara Platform Enterprise, (see here for more info on the release streams).

The Community stream has received new features and enhancements during each quarterly release, but those on the stability stream have been waiting patiently to ensure the new bells and whistles have been thoroughly tested and are stable for production environments. With Payara Platform 5.201, a year's worth of community features are now available and stable for our Payara Enterprise customers on the Stability stream.

Here are the main highlights for what those who have been on the stability stream can look forward to when they move to Payara Platform 5.201:

Monitoring Console

The monitoring console provides a new way of viewing the metrics coming out of Payara Server with a customisable rolling view of these metrics from each instance across the domain.

For the 5.201 release, we’ve also added support for monitoring slow SQL queries, Payara and MicroProfile health checks, hogging & stuck threads, and custom watches to define health warnings on the fly for any metric.

Read more about updates to the monitoring console here.

Data Grid Encryption

New in for 5.201, encryption of the data stored within the data grid of Hazelcast (the technology underpinning our deployment groups and clustering in Payara 5) has until now required a Hazelcast Enterprise subscription (see Payara Scales). While this remains an option for those who would like the additional features it provides (such as WAN replication), we’ve introduced this particular feature into Payara Server itself to provide it to you without the additional subscription, allowing you to encrypt web session persistence, stateful session bean persistence, request traces, and historic health checks.

Read more about data grid encryption here.

MicroProfile 3.2

MicroProfile support continues, with a jump from 2.1 to 3.2! MicroProfile 3.2 contains the following specifications:

• Config 1.3
• Fault Tolerance 2.0 (was 1.1)
• JWT Authentication 1.1
• OpenTracing 1.3 (was 1.2)
• OpenAPI 1.1 (was 1.0)
• Rest Client 1.3 (was 1.1)
• Health Check 2.1 (was 1.0)
• Metrics 2.2 (was 1.1)

Of these specs, Health Check and Metrics contain breaking changes, so I recommend viewing the respective Health and Metrics change logs for further details.

Jakarta EE 8 Compliance

Payara Server 5.193.1 was our first Jakarta EE 8 certified release, and now that we’re re-syncing with the community stream, this means that we’ll begin certifying the stability stream releases as well. This should bring an extra level of confidence to our stability stream releases as they will be run against the full Jakarta EE TCK.

JDK 11

First introduced in 5.192 as a tech-preview, we began fully supporting JDK11 in 5.194. This support continues into 5.201, meaning that our new stability stream will be supported running against JDK 11.

Docker Nodes

Docker Nodes were first introduced in 5.192 and have seen continual improvements since then. Allowing full management from the DAS, or registration of instances direct from the Docker containers themselves, this feature aids you in managing a Payara Server domain deployed to an environment utilising Docker.

Click here for Payara Platform and Docker resources.

Autogenerate Instance Names

Introduced in 5.193 as “Dynamic Instance Naming”, this feature allows you to auto-generate names for Payara Server instances rather than being required to supply your own – particularly useful for auto-scaling environments in tandem with the Docker Nodes feature.

EJB over HTTP Enhancements

Introduced for the last stability stream release of 5.191, we’ve continued to add improvements to this feature of allowing you to invoke EJBs over HTTP rather than utilising RMI-IIOP, namely:

• JSON-B serialisation support
• Client-side adapters

Certificate Realm Improvements

To aid those using client-cert authentication, we’ve added some ease-of-use improvements to the Payara Platform over 2019. The headline improvement being to allow using the use of the Common Name (CN) field as the caller principal’s name – previously you had to use the Distinguished Name (DN) which was quite unwieldy.

We also made efforts to ensure that the DN format to use was RFC-2253; in 5.191 it wasn’t always consistent, switching between RFC-2253 and RFC-1779.

Component Upgrades

As you might expect (or so I’d hope you’d expect!), we’ve updated a number of the external components we make use of in the Payara Platform. Several of the component upgrades were for Payara Platform internals, such as HK2, but plenty were front facing:

• Felix (OSGi)
• JLine (CLI parser)
• Jackson (JSON)
• Weld (CDI)
• Google Guava removed
• Mojarra (JSF)
• Jersey (JAX-RS)

While not an upgrade in functionality, we’ve also switched from using the Java EE 8 artefacts to the new Jakarta EE 8 ones.

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