Payara Platform: The Road to Jakarta EE 10

Payara Engineering have recently released Payara Server Community 6 Alpha 3 and Payara Server Community 6 Alpha 4 as major milestones on the road to full Jakarta EE 10 support.

In this blog, we will explore what these releases can do and how you can use them to help in your migration to Payara 6 and Jakarta EE 10.

Jakarta EE 10 Is Coming 

Jakarta EE 10 is an exciting new release ofJakarta EE,as it is the first release with major changes, for developers, since the migration of Java EE from Oracle to theEclipse Foundation.The key goals of the Jakarta EE 10 release are simplicity, modernization and ensuring it is lightweight. The platform has been simplified with removal and deprecation of the older Java EE APIs including removing areas that have been deprecated from Java EE for many years. The platform is modernized to bring it up to date, supporting the latestJDK 11API changes and supportingJDK 17as the runtime JDK. Finally, Jakarta EE 10 introduces a new lightweight Core Profile which serves as the foundation forMicroProfile. 

We have developed a full fact sheet on Jakarta EE 10 which you can download for free:

Payara Community Is Moving to Jakarta EE 10

Payara 6 Community is the next major release of the Payara Platform, which is targeting Jakarta EE 10 compatibility. For all developers that are creating applications on Java EE 8/Jakarta EE 8, the move to Jakarta EE 10 will be a breaking change. First and foremost, the namespace of all APIs is changing to the jakarta namespace from the javax namespace. Secondly, the removal of a lot of deprecated API features will break applications that still use these deprecated APIs.

If you wish to keep using Payara 5/Jakarta EE 8, you will need to move to Payara 5 Enterprise,as Payara 5 Community will soon stop recieving updates. Please talk to a member of our Sales team:

We are targeting Payara Platform 6 Beta to be released as a compatible implementation of Jakarta EE 10 as close as possible to the release of the Jakarta EE 10 platform from the Eclipse Foundation. This will mean that Payara 6 Beta will have passed the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) released with Jakarta EE 10. On the road to the first 6 full release we will be putting out a number of interim releases. We detail these below.

Payara Platform Community 6 Alpha 3

Payara 6 Community Alpha 3 was recently released. This version passes the Jakarta EE 10 Core Profile TCKs. The Jakarta EE 10 Core Profile includes a subset of the full Jakarta EE 10 APIs including Annotations, CDI lite, Dependency Injection, Interceptors, JSON Processing, JSON Binding and RESTful Web Services. Alpha 3 can be used to test applications that use these APIs. It also includes other Jakarta EE 10 APIs but in Alpha 3 these may have not passed the relevant TCK. 

Payara Platform Community 6 Alpha 3 contains the security vulnerability CVE-2022-37422. Please therefore only use it for testing purposes.

Payara Platform Community 6 Alpha 4

We’ve recently alsoreleased Alpha 4. This version passes the Jakarta EE 10 Core and Full Platform TCKs. This means Alpha 4 includes all the Jakarta EE 10 APIs and can be used as a target platform for developers looking to start migrating applications from Jakarta EE 8 or to develop new Jakarta EE 10 applications. Alpha 4 is designated an Alpha release by the team because currently the administration console is not functioning due to the extensive changes in Jakarta Faces. We are currently updating the administration console to run on the latest Jakarta EE 10 version of Faces.

What's Next?

After the Alpha 4 release, our next milestone version will be Payara Platform 6 Beta 1 Community. The Beta version will be feature complete with a functioning administration console and is the pre-cursor to the release of Payara Platform Community 6.2022.1 which will the first stable release of the Payara 6 Community stream.

We envisage that the full release of 6 will follow very close to the Beta. In fact, if we find we do not have any major known issues before the Beta release we may skip the Beta and go straight to the major release. Once this has happened the masterGitHub branch for Payarawill switch to development of Payara 6.

Payara 5 Community Will Be Replaced by Payara 5 Enterprise

Some time after the release of version 6 of the Payara Platform, we will create the terminal release of the Payara 5 Community stream. Our aim is to fix and roll into this release any major defects and security patches we have outstanding for 5. Development of this release will be on a newly created 5 branch in the GitHub repo. After this terminal release we don’t envisage any new Payara 5 Community releases and community development will switch to Payara 6 Community. 

Development of Payara 5 Enterprise will continue and the Enterprise stream will receive continued updates through to 2028 in accordance with our10 year software lifecycle policy.

Our philosophy is that Community streams of our products are focused on innovation and rapid development of new features and capabilities to get them out to the Jakarta EE development community as quickly as possible, while ensuring the quality of our individual community releases.

Innovation is switching to Jakarta EE 10 (Watch our webinar with the Eclipse Foundation,Why Jakarta EE 10 is the biggest thing to happen to Java in 20 years.). Payara 6 Community is our target for cutting edge development innovation. Enterprise streams of our products are focused on support, stability and performanceand therefore Payara 5 Enterprise will continue development for many years and should be the target for any production systems you have running on the Payara 5 stream. Payara 6 Enterprise will have tooling to support migrating applications and Payara domains from Jakarta EE 8 to Jakarta EE 10 and will likely come 3 – 5 months after the first major Payara 6 Community release.

Summary 

Payara 6 Community Alpha 3 and 4 are nowavailable for use. These are interim releases and do not include all features, but they pave the way for Payara 6 Community proper: TCK-compatibility and full functionality of our Community product with Jakarta EE 10. If you prefer video, I also explained the changes inthis webinar.

If you want to keep using earlier Jakarta EE versions - it's time to consider a move to Payara Enterprise. 

We run through several different scenarios you may be facing as a company with the release of Payara 6 Communityhere, see which applies to you and what we advise: