Payara Server Community 6.2021.1.Alpha1 is now a Certified Jakarta EE 9.1 (Full Profile) Compatible Product

Payara has released Payara Server Community 6 (Alpha version) which has passed the Jakarta EE 9.1 TCK on JDK 11. This means Payara Server Community 6.2021.1.Alpha1 is a certified Jakarta EE 9.1 implementation. 

Jakarta EE 9.1 has no functional changes to Jakarta EE 9 and is an extension to the Jakarta EE 9 release which adds certification on JDK 11. It allows developers to officially use Java SE 11 features in Jakarta EE applications, and makes it possible to migrate your Jakarta EE apps to Java SE 11 without changes. (Although this has already been possible with Payara Platform 5 for quite a while!) The Jakarta EE 9.1 release is the first incremental release of Jakarta EE and the start of future incremental releases (as opposed to waiting a year or more for a large release).

We don’t advise running Payara Server 6 Alpha in production at this time. There is currently no MicroProfile compatible version of Jakarta EE 9.1, so if your applications use MicroProfile they will not work on Payara Server 6 Alpha. Luckily, you do not need to use Payara Server 6 Alpha to run on JDK 11 as you’ve been able to run Payara Platform 5 on JDK 11 for several years already! 

If you would like to test your current Jakarta EE 8 application with Jakarta EE 9 or 9.1, it requires that you change the namespace from javax* to jakarta*. When using Payara, the Eclipse Transformer tool helps you automatically transform the namespace during deployment. The tool converts from javax* to jakarta* on Payara Server 6 and from jakarta* to javax* on Payara Server 5.  

Using Jakarta EE 9.1 with Payara Platform 5 makes it possible to continue using the MicroProfile specifications.  More work on Payara Platform 6 is planned with the final release to contain Jakarta EE 10 with all of its new features.