The upcoming JDK 22 release is set to introduce a promising new feature, JEP 461: Stream Gatherers (Preview), aimed at enriching the Java Stream API with capabilities for custom intermediate operations. This addition will enable you to manipulate data streams in ways that were previously complex or not directly supported by the existing API. 

Greetings Payara Community! Enjoy our favourite bits we gathered in our monthly catch for January.

Payara Micro is a lightweight Jakarta EE and MicroProfile runtime optimized for containerization and microservices. Given the rise of cloud native and containerized application deployments, Payara Micro is a great choice for when you need consistent performance from a smaller runtime. In this blog post, we take a look at five Payara Micro features that you may not know about.  

Payara Cloud is our robust platform designed to simplify and streamline the deployment, management, and monitoring of your Jakarta EE and MicroProfile applications. By eliminating the need for much of the usual server configuration and maintenance, it allows you to focus more on your core business logic, delivering value much faster to your customers.

Splashing into the new year with vigor, the Payara Engineering kitchen announces the first release of Payara Platform for 2024.

This release brings enhancements, security fixes, and bug fixes, ensuring a more robust and efficient environment for your mission critical workload.  Payara Enterprise 6.10.0 (request free trial) comes with 2 improvements, 4 bug fixes, 10 component upgrades and 2 security fixes. Payara Community 6.2024.1 (download here) also comes with 2 improvements, 4 bug fixes, 10 component upgrades and 2 security fixes.

In the digital age, where data breaches are common and privacy is paramount, ensuring users use strong passwords is the first step to securing applications from never-ending threats. Passay, a Java password generation and policy management library helps enhance the security layer of any Java application. Let's dive into the core components of Passay in this blog post to see how you can employ it in your own applications. 

Kubernetes is a topic that is frequently discussed in the development community, especially as the IT landscape increasingly shifts towards cloud and microservices. However, it’s crucial to evaluate whether it is genuinely indispensable for your environment or just another case of the next 'new and shiny' object capturing attention without substantial benefits. In this blog, we’ll delve into the reasons why Kubernetes might sometimes fall victim to the hype and explore whether it is the right fit for all scenarios. 

The Java Platform, over the years, has shown how resilient and reliable a development platform it is. Of course, as developers, we always want to see how fast we can execute our code. Well, now you have the chance to find out, or actually prove how fast Java is. Gunnar Morling, Software Engineer at Decodable has a very exciting Java warmup game for us all. He calls it the One Billion Row Challenge. Huh? Yup. Let's hear it from him.

Now that New Year is here, we reflect on 2023 and look ahead to what you can expect from our entire suite of Payara products in 2024. What is the future for Payara Community, Enterprise and Payara Cloud? Read below to find out more about Payara Rodmap in the coming months -  Java 21 compatibility, the upcoming Jakarta EE 11 and our plan for support, and more!

You can also watch the Payara Roadmap 2024 presentedat the Virtual Payara Conference last month.

Unleash the power of concurrency in your Jakarta EE applications on the Payara Platform by diving into the world of multi-threaded programming. This hands-on webinar - WATCH HERE - explores the different approaches to writing multi-threaded applications on the Jakarta EE Platform, with a special spotlight on the groundbreaking virtual threads introduced in Java 21.

As applications grow in complexity, ensuring smooth and efficient execution becomes paramount. Multi-threading is a great tool in your developer arsenal, facilitating concurrent task execution, significantly improving application performance and responsiveness. The introduction of virtual threads in Java 21 has further broadened the horizon, offering a simplified, high-throughput concurrency model.