Introduction

The release of Jakarta EE 9, at the end of 2020, was in many ways a historic event. The Java Enterprise framework is already 20 years old, having its first release in 1999. It has changed names a few times but the main concepts of the first release can still be found in this new release. During all those years, it has adapted itself to keep it up to date but has always adhered to its main principle of stability and backward compatibility.

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!

The Payara Platform 2021 Survey is underway and we're inviting everyone to answer a few questions about your use of the Payara Platform and ecosystem components. We want to know what you like, what you want to see improved, and we're giving you the opportunity to vote on new features you'd like to see added to the Payara Platform.

United by our passion for Open Source, we are very excited to be teaming up with IBM for another panel event. In this session we will be discussing all things security. How can you minimise security risks when developing your applications?

The JBatch Jakarta EE specification describes the process of how background jobs can be executed on a Jakarta EE compatible runtime. Using the Batch Specification, the runtime can execute some jobs that don't require any user input. Most of the time they are scheduled to execute at a certain moment of the day, but they can be triggered on-demand.

This month we release Payara Platform Enterprise 5.25.0 (request here) with 4 improvements and 3 new features, including an update to the Upgrade Tool released last month that gives the ability to restore the domain configuration from the backup with the rollback-server command.

Meanwhile, the Payara Platform Community 5.2021.1 (download here) introduces support for the complete MicroProfile 4.0 specifications, a Hazelcast upgrade providing better support for Amazon AWS, improved stability of HTTP2, and a large number of community contributions. 

Don't miss our release overview virtual event next week, which is now open for registrations on Meetup here. 

Read more below to find out the details.

Introduction

The release of Jakarta EE 9 breaks a tradition of Java Enterprise. A legal requirement of the Java EE code donation from Oracle to the Eclipse Foundation is the change of the namespace of javax to jakarta.

But the change of the package and XML namespace in Jakarta EE 9 is only the beginning. The change of the namespace allows for new development and functionality, but all frameworks and libraries using one of the Java Enterprise specifications also need to be adjusted to the new version.

The last Payara Platform release of 2020 is here!  With this patch release of Payara Platform Enterprise 5.23.1, we're introducing more improvements and component upgrades to Payara InSight as well as a couple useful bug fixes. Meanwhile, the Payara Platform Community 5.2020.7 introduces some improvements and additions to the MicroProfile specs in preparation for the upcoming MicroProfile 4.0 release. We are also happy to confirm that Payara Platform Web Profile is now Jakarta EE 8 compatible!

You can download Payara Platform Community 5.2020.7 here and request Payara Platform Enterprise 5.23.1 here. 

Read more below to find out the details.

As leading contributors to the Jakarta EE project, Payara excitedly welcomes Jakarta EE 9 - now officially released! 

Announced at today’s Jakarta One Livestream, the headline breaking change is the move from the package namespace javax to jakarta across the Jakarta EE 9 Platform, Web Profile specifications, and related TCKS. 

Through our involvement in the Eclipse Foundation Jakarta EE Working Group, we are proud to play a major role in shaping, improving and championing Jakarta EE 9. The specifications will be key to the evolution of cloud native technologies for Java, also central to Payara's mission. 

Payara Server Web Profile (Enterprise Edition 5.23.0 and Community Edition 5.2020.6), has passed the approximately 18,000 open sourced licensed Jakarta EE 8 TCKs for the Web Profile Platform and is now a Jakarta EE 8 Web Profile compatible implementation. Payara Server is available for download here.