The Payara Monthly Catch: February 2021

In our February Monthly Catch,  we’ve rounded up a wide range of the most useful learning materials, community news pieces, videos and podcasts from the world of Java, Jakarta EE and MicroProfile - and of course provided updates from Team Payara!

As we progress into the year, the new releases of Jakarta EE - including the breaking namespace change - and MicroProfile are becoming more embedded and discussed. For example, it was great to see Dalia Shea from JetBrains discuss using the new “jakarta” namespace, and Michael Redlich at InfoQ summarizing the JakartaOne conference where Jakarta EE 9 was officially announced.

We’re also seeing a lot of looking round the corner to what’s next for our community: to JDK 17, as well as the innovations coming through Project Loom and Project Panama.

It also seems to be unofficial survey season! We’ve launched our own, Omnifaces have published its survey’s fascinating results looking into JakartaEE and MicroProfile, and you still have time to answer questions forthe Snyk and Azul survey that came out this month. It’s exciting to see so many opportunities for people to feedback, drive and shape the future of Enterprise Java and its associated technologies.

If you enjoy the content, make sure to follow us on our Twitter and LinkedIn, for the very latest news as it comes in. 

Enjoy!

Partnerships and Payarans

This month, we partnered with Platform.Sh for Deploy Friday -  Rudy De Busscher and Fabio Turizo talked with Otávio Santana and Chad Carlson, covering Jakarta EE, microservices, the relationship between Payara and GlassFish, and more. 

Payara's Lenny Primak is a Hazelcast hero! - His pull request was recently merged to the project. He discussed with Nicolas Frankel everything from his past life as a pilot to contributing to #OpenSource (and why he is nicknamed "the breaker").

"Foojay is a nascent-but-evolving-at-warp-speed Java information consolidation site for everyone from hard-core, in-the-trenches Java jocks to the Java curious... it is a thing of beauty." said John K. Waters in ADT Magazine. We're proud to be on the advisory board! 

For Valentine's Day, Open UK committed to fostering belonging in the open source community, through leading with data, setting targets, empowering leaders, paying attention to young people and more. Our CEO Steve Millidge was  a signatory.

The schedule for Foojay’s Virtual JUG Tour is out! - Payara's Rudy De Busscher will speak St Louis JUG. Does your Java User Group want to hear Rudy's Kubernetes Operator talk? You can still request it! 

New features between Java 8 and Java 16 - Payaran Ondro Mihályi  provides a very useful blog. He's compiled a table with all the new features added since Java 8 for each version! 

Using Payara

Adam Bien answers your questions - Particularly useful is timestamp 8.30 - 14.00, where Adam helps a Java developer using Payara Platform with EclipseLink as a JPA implementation - explaining when Payara might serialise/deserialise entity objects.

MicroProfile Config API demonstrated on Payara Micro - MicroProfile has many features. Here Diego Silval demonstrates how easy it is to create microservices, using this API, and how to run it with our lightweight middleware platform.

Articles

Microservices From the Trenches - It's good to see balanced conversation around microservices architecture , pros and cons. There are a variety of perspectives here, including Matt Heath from Monzo and company Segment , who moved BACK to monolithic after changing!

How To Select The Best DevSecOps Tools To Secure Your SDLC - This JFrog blog looks at 7 musts when choosing the tools for your DevOps strategy. "DevSecOps is no longer a wish list item for a CIO."

Creating New Jakarta EE Persistence and JPA Applications - Great to see Dalia Shea discussing the major transformation of Java Enterprise, with namespace change javax to jakarta. She helps you create your persistence applications.

Choosing Java for low latency systems - "Java is easy to write, compile, debug, and learn, and this means you can spend less time writing code and more time optimizing it for latency" Compelling argument in Stack Overflow blog.

REST: Partial updates with PATCH - This blog by Michael Scharhag shows you how to use the JSON Merge Patch for partial resource updates.

Quick Security Wins and Getting Started with DevSecOps - Sven Ruppert for Foojay takes you through key considerations, such as whether to make or buy layers of your cloud native stack, scanning for vulnerabilities and compliance issues. 

Are You Following These Jenkins Best Practices? - For DZone, Kritika Murari explains how you can get the most out of this popular DevOps tool - used regularly both by Payara Platform users and our own engineering team.

Hash Join Algorithm - Vlad Mihalcea shows how it works and when it’s suitable for a relational database system to employ to execute an SQL JOIN query. Traditionally, MySQL has only offered Nested Loops algorithm, but now it supports this as well. 

What Are Microservices? - Shamik Mitra’s provides 11 characteristics of successful microservices architecture. Of course, the core requirement is componentisation of services but there's more to think about, from CICD pipeline to tracing.

Introduction to Event-driven Change Data Capture - As your application evolves, capture changes to source data and propagate to derived data in a scalable way. Dunith Dhanushka shows you how with, perhaps using Debezium.

Deciphering the stack trace - What to do when it all goes wrong? Here, Joakim Nordström looks at crash logs. To figure out and solve the problem, you must learn how to decipher the hs_err file that is generated when the Java Virtual Machine crashes.

Breaking down and fixing Kubernetes - Kubernetes allows you to automate deployment, scaling and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts using Payara Platform. But what about when it breaks? Andrei Kvapil on how to avoid downtime.

MySQL Query Profiling Using Performance Schema - Vlad Mihalcea shows you how to use MySQL to instrument queries and store their trace information in tables that you can later inspect in order to determine why a given SQL statement is slow.

Java Threads: Are They Memory Efficient? - Java multithreading is a hot topic in 2021, with Project Loom and virtual threading on the cards. This DZone article runs through an experiment that tested memory use of Java threads and how to optimize them.

Pancake time!

Tuesday 16 February was Shrove Tuesday, the day also known as Pancake Tuesday, where many people make pancakes to celebrate the day before the Christian period of Lent. At Payara Services, we celebrated with themed pancakes! Can you spot some key Community logos? 

Videos and podcasts 

Working with Gradle in IntelliJ Idea - This new Trisha Gee video shows you how to create, open and work with Gradle  projects in IntelliJ IDEA - both can be used with Payara Platform.

Modern scalable concurrency for Java - OpenJDK engineer Alan Bateman explains about Project Loom's aim: allowing Java developers to write scalable synchronous apps by making the thread cheap enough to represent ANY concurrent task.

Foreign Linker API: Java native access without C - Looking ahead! It will be a while before JDK 16 Foreign Linker API is for use in the Payara Platform, but here Markus Karg provides a look ahead at this "game-changing" innovation to invoke native code. 

VS Code Tips and Tricks - Using Visual Code Studio with Payara Platform? We love these code hacks from Sana Ajani - and the visual representation! Whether you are learning or a long-time user, you'll be sure to learn some new shortcuts for more efficient work. 

Coffee with Thorben Janssen covering JPQL vs Criteria vs Native Queries - With JPQL , native SQL and also JPA's Criteria API, it may seem there are 3 ways to do the same thing in Hibernate . Thorben discusses pros and cons for each method.

Inside Java podcast "#JDK Flight Recorder” with Markus Gronlund and Chad Arimura - This useful episode describes how continuous monitoring of high quantities of information through JDK Flight Recorder helps diagnose problems in production systems. 

When Java Records Met Serialization: A Happy Tale - Records are a type of class, to be final in Java 16. Coupling of immutable state and API makes them suitable for many use cases, one is serialization. Learn more from Chris Hegarty and Julia Boes. 

Community News

JakartaOne Conference Livestream 2020 InfoQ summary - The Eclipse Foundation conference in December launched Jakarta EE 9 and our CEO Steve Millidge contributed in the industry keynotes, see Michael P. Redlich’s summary here. 

Cesar Hernandez,  Otávio Santana, Emily Jiang and Erin Schnabel discussed MicroProfile in this InfoQ panel - Payara was a founding vendor! Thanks to MicroProfile APIs , cloud native applications are slim and portable, and work on all runtimes supporting MicroProfile, including Payara Micro. 

Support for MicroProfile 4.0 is complete in Payara Platform Community Edition! - Final versions of MicroProfile specifications are here. We are now pending compatibility recognition from Eclipse Foundation. Find out what's changed in the spec. 

684 Jakarta EE MicroProfile users responded to this OmniFaces survey - Interesting findings include users wanting a single product for both of these Eclipse Foundation frameworks and Hibernate as most used additional library. 

Java News Roundup by Michael Redlich for InfoQ -  This useful article collates everything you need to know from recent Java news, including early access JDK 17 builds available, Project Panama releases,  Frozen Arrays and  Pattern Switching. 

What’s new in Java? - Mikael Sukoinen interviews experts including friends of Payara Azul’s Simon Ritte, Foojay’s, Geertjan Wielenga and Okta’s Matt Raible on the latest in the world of Java: JDK 16, Project Loom and Foojay itself!