Payara Services Celebrates the Release of Jakarta EE 9

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. 

Payara’s Role in Driving Forward Jakarta EE 9 

Payara has been a key contributor to Jakarta EE since 2017. This was when Oracle first announced it was donating Jakarta EE and related GlassFish technologies to the Eclipse Foundation, one of the world’s largest open source software foundations. 

Payara seized the opportunity to push the advances we had made to the GlassFish software back into upstream Enterprise Java. We recently expanded on this journeyin the first Eclipse Foundation Contributor’s case study.

As a strategic member of the Jakarta EE Working Group, we joined other companies in the open, vendor-neutral, community-driven process of developing the Jakarta EE 9 technology. Since the milestone release in June, the bulk of the work has been ensuring all compatible implementations have passed the standalone TCKs and/or the CTS in the new namespace.

Significantly, Payara is the leading contributor company to the Eclipse GlassFish project. The team has worked to ensure GlassFish 6.0.0 is Eclipse-branded and passes the Jakarta EE 9 Compatibility Test Suite, enabling it for release as a Compatible Implementation of Jakarta EE 9. This certification has been announced alongside the release of the Jakarta EE 9 specifications, with our founder Steve Millidge leading the project. 

Jakarta EE 9 with Payara Server 

Payara is committed to driving innovation in the Enterprise Java community, and this includes encouraging users of the Payara Platform try out Jakarta EE 9. 

To this end, the October release of Payara Community 5.2020.5 introduced a tech preview functionality to run Jakarta EE 9 on Payara Server and Micro. Using the Eclipse Transformer tooling, users can transform existing Jakarta EE 8 binary to Jakarta EE 9, allowing them to start experimenting and migrating applications. You can read more about this in our blog on the subject, ‘Eclipse Transformer Configuration Option with Jakarta EE 9 Milestone release.’  

We aim to achieve  full support of Jakarta EE 9 in 2021, guided by how users of Payara Platform will want to adjust to the namespace change. 

Support for applications in both the Jakarta EE 8 and Jakarta EE 9 namespace will continue.

We’ve taken care to regularly engage and listen to our community, with feedback from Payara Platform users telling us they will still need to support functionality equivalent Jakarta EE 8 applications, alongside wanting tools to migrate current applications to Jakarta EE 9. 

In the longer term, we are targeting Payara Server 6 as a fully compatible Jakarta EE 9 and Jakarta EE 10 implementation.

Continuing in our commitment to driving adoption and understanding of the new namespace in the  Community and what this means for Payara Platform users, the move to Jakarta EE 9 will be the focus of our Community release event.  This will give users the chance to ask our engineers any questions they might have.

Join our December Release Overview & Jakarta EE 9 Community Event for your chance to learn more: