Java 11 Support in Payara Server Coming Soon

The world is moving in fast forward and the Java ecosystem is no exception. In 2017, the release of Java 9 disrupted the Java ecosystem with the introduction of Java modules. Soon after, the new six months Java release cycle caused another disruption, with three new Java major versions released since then. The Payara team have been working hard to keep up with this new, faster velocity. Although the latest Payara Server version 5.191 doesn’t run on Java 11 yet, we’re very close and can confidently say the next version of Payara Server will run on Java 11.

How the Payara Platform Keeps Up With the Java World

We’ve been working on adding Java 11 support to Payara Server and Payara Micro in parallel to adding new features to 5.191. Our internal milestone of the upcoming version 5.192 can now pass 99% of our test suite on Java 11 and we’re confident the rest of the tests will pass and will add more tests for Java 11 long before the planned release date of 5.192.

At the first glance, it may seem that we’ve failed to keep up with the new velocity in the Java world. But the contrary is true. The Java world moves even faster than the core Java itself. The Java EE ecosystem and MicroProfile specifications evolve rapidly. Payara Platform is fast in adopting the new standard APIs, and even actively contributes in evolving the specifications so that the whole Java community can benefit from modern, and yet standard and ubiquitous APIs.

Payara Platform was the First Production-Ready Application Platform to Support Java EE Applications

In 2018, we’ve added support for Java EE 8 applications into both Payara Server and Payara Micro, making the Payara Platform the first production-ready application platform to support Java EE applications. The Eclipse MicroProfile specification released 5 new versions, including a major update to MicroProfile 2.0, and the Payara Platform was among the first vendors to implement each of them. Besides those new standard features, we have been adding new features requested by our customers and user community. We’ve also done some house keeping by replacing some old GlassFish components with more modern alternatives suitable for cloud deployment, clustering and refactoring a lot of components to improve support for Java 11, and make then more robust and lean in general. And on top of that, we’ve greatly contributed to making Eclipse Glassfish 5.1 release a reality and helped migrating a lot of Java EE specifications to the new, fully open source Jakarta EE project.

The Future is Bright!

So yes, we’re a bit sad that we couldn’t announce Java 11 support in our 5.191 release. However, we’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far in the past year. And with 99% of our tests passing on Java 11 with our current milestone, the future is bright and we’re very confident we'll have support for Java 11 in version 5.192.