Payara Server is Jakarta EE 8 Compatible!

We are very happy to report that we've successfully passed all of nearly 50,000 test suites of Jakarta EE 8 TCK, and Payara Server 5.193.1 is Jakarta EE 8 Full Profile compatible!

Mike Milinkovich, executive director for the Eclipse Foundation talks about our compatibility:

Congratulations to Payara for being one of the first to deliver on the promise of Jakarta EE's open specifications and branding process. It is important to note that Payara is a new vendor to this ecosystem, as they were never a Java EE licensee. It is great to see Jakarta EE's open community processes bring in new organizations and implementations. We fully expect many more organizations to follow in Payara's pioneering footsteps.

Java EE to Jakarta EE is a Seamless Transition

Just a reminder - you don't have to make any changes to your applications. The transition from Java EE to Jakarta EE is seamless, it's only the license of the APIs that have changed. We invite you to try that yourself: we are opening this Payara Server release to everyone - a release that would normally only be available to our support customers - and you can get it from our download page.

Why the need for a new release if nothing really changes, you may ask? Jakarta EE platform is large, and not all of it is under heavy use by our community and customers. The TCK suite did uncover some edge cases that are rare to see in the wild. Thousands of server restarts carried out during the testing helped identify and fix some race conditions during server start to achieve greater stability of the server as well.

Compatibility is not a one-time goal, either. We want to ensure that any future changes to Payara Server don't affect our ongoing compatibility with Jakarta EE, so the TCK verification is now one of our steps in making a new Payara Platform release. In the upcoming Payara Platform 194 release, we will also add compatibility testing of our Web distribution and Payara Micro for the Web profile.

Steve Millidge, founder of Payara Services says:

The Payara team is extremely proud to be among the first few companies to achieve Jakarta EE 8 Full Platform Compatibility, starting with Payara Platform 5.193.1. This is a significant milestone for Payara and the team has done a huge amount of work to get this done. I think this is a great adoption story for Jakarta EE in general as Payara Server is not a Java EE 8 implementation and this shows that Jakarta EE is an open standard and can bring in new organisations and implementations.

Onwards to Jakarta EE 9

Now that Jakarta EE 8 is released and Payara Server is a compatible implementation thoughts turn to Jakarta EE 9. Decisions have to be made by the community on the javax namespace and whether to support a Big Bang or Incremental transition to Jakarta. We also need to look at pruning some old APIs and introducing new APIs and evolving existing APIs. To contribute to the discussion, join the Jakarta EE mailing lists here.

We at Payara are looking forward to driving Jakarta EE 9 onwards and delivering a Jakarta EE 9 compatible platform soon for our community. 

You can see all of the updates of this release in the Payara Server release notes.