Earlier this week, Jakarta EE 9.1 was released. This is an update to Jakarta EE 9, adding support for JDK 11 - you can read more about it in our bloghere.

Alongside the Jakarta EE 9.1 release, GlassFish 6.1 has been released as a Compatible Implementation. 

However, although GlassFish is still used by many - a legacy of the time it was supported by Oracle - we would argue it is NOT a good choice for running your enterprise applications in production.

If you are considering updating to more recent GlassFish versions, it might be better to consider more reliable, supported, and up-to-date alternatives. In this blog, I explain why GlassFish 6.x is not the best choice for your mission critical deployments.

Payara Services are celebrating the release of Jakarta EE 9.1 Platform and Web Profile specifications and related TCKs.

With Jakarta EE 9.1, global source community Eclipse Foundation brings to Java developers the first incremental Jakarta EE release since the new namespace was introduced last year. Read the Eclipse Foundation announcement here - featuring a quote from our Founder and CEO Steve Millidge.

Payara's team have not only worked hard to ensure Jakarta EE 9.1 applications can be run in Payara Platform 5, but Payara Platform 6 alpha one is very close to being ready as a Compatible Implementation. Watch this space! 

In this series about getting started with Jakarta EE 9, we look at various specifications and how you can use them for your next application. In the previous blogs of this series, we set up our development environment and had a closer look at implementing REST endpoints.

This time, I will explain a few features of Context and Dependency Injection (CDI). The CDI specification is an important backbone of Jakarta EE as it brings several specifications together. Over the years, it became more and more important as an increasing number of specifications started using CDI as the basis for it.

In this blog, I will tell a bit about the different scopes, the interceptor mechanism, and the Event system.

We kicked off the year with the Payara Roadmap for 2021. In this January webinar, Steve provided: detail on benefits of the Jakarta EE model; how the Payara Platform is evolving and moving toward Payara 6; updates and progress of the Payara Cloud project, our new PaaS product; and latest news regarding the next major OpenJDK release - JDK 17 Long Term Support (LTS) and what that means for Payara Platform.

Find a full-write up here:https://blog.payara.fish/payara-roadmap-2021 

In this May update, Steve gives a check-in on how we are progressing along our roadmap, with a retrospective on the year so far and details on what the rest of the year is set to look like. He provides a snapshot of where we are in relation to the plans and projects he mapped out at the beginning of the year.

Steve also discusses the results of the Payara Platform 2021 Survey. If you haven't had a chance to read the full report and summary yet, make sure you do by following this link:https://blog.payara.fish/2021-payara-platform-survey-results

It's been an incredibly exciting month for Team Payara! We were honoured with a Queen's Award for Enterprise. This is the UK's most prestigious business award, often called the 'Knighthood for Businesses' and our award particularly recognises our international sucess. CEO and Founder Steve Millidge thanked the entire team in his blog, which also went more into detail about what this means for the wider Jakarta EE and MicroProfile community. 

In other Payara Services news, we're also 'buzzing' about our new Charity of the Year, the Bumblebee Conservation Trust - and see Payaran Lenny Primak below on Adam Bien's podcast, and Rudy De Busscher joining forces with IntelliJ IDEA! 

Community highlights included the release of the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA, with our engineersworking hard to update our Payara Platform pugins accordingly due to high demand from the community. We were also excited by news of the newMicrosoft Build of OpenJDK. 

Read more about all this and more in the below round-up of news, articles, videos and podcasts. 

We’re pleased to announce that our 2021 Payara Platform Survey results are now available! 

This survey was promoted to our audience between March and April 2021. We shared with Payara Platform Enterprise customers and Community users via social media, emails and blogs. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to contribute!

In this blog, we show you how to start your next Jakarta EE application with Visual Studio Code  using the plugin for the Payara Server.

We will create a Maven project so that you can also build it outside the IDE, such as in your CI environment, so you can automate your deployments.

In this Release Overview Webinar, Rudy De Busscher discusses the recent updates and enhancements to the Payara Platform in the latest release.

This month we release Payara Platform Enterprise 5.27.0 (request here) with 18 improvements and 3 new features, including an update to the previously released Upgrade Tool, an automated JBatch Job execution data cleanup feature, and the addition of a pluggable Notifier API with the ability to create your own notifiers.

Meanwhile, the Payara Platform Community 5.2021.2 (download here) includes improvements for running Jakarta EE 9 applications. 

Don't miss our release overview virtual event on the 20th of April, which is now open for registrations on Meetup here. 

Read more below to find out the details.

It's that time again, our March monthly catch! The "fishes" in our "net" are Java, Jakarta EE, Open Source and Microprofile articles, news stories, videos and podcasts we've found useful and interesting, as well as a few Payara Services updates.

Big news this month is the General Availability release of Java 16. Articles under the 'Java EE' subheading in our Community news section below provide expert opinions on what's new in this release.