So, you're a Java developer, or maybe you're aspiring to be one. Either way, you've probably faced the challenge of managing multiple versions of Java on your machine. One project requires Java 8, but another needs Java 11, yet another requires Java 17. The open-source library you're keen on contributing to needs yet another version. What do you do? You start juggling environment variables, and before you know it, your system is a tangled mess of configurations. Not fun, right?

And let's not even get started on the difference between JRE and JDK. It's easy for beginners to get confused about the distinction between the two. The JRE (Java Runtime Environment) is sufficient if you just want to run Java applications, but if you're going to be developing them, you'll need the JDK (Java Development Kit). The JDK includes everything the JRE has, plus additional tools and utilities for developers like the Java compiler, or javac.

Tired of all this complexity? Let me introduce you to SDKMan!, a version manager that streamlines the process, making it a breeze to manage multiple Java versions on your machine. Not just Java, SDKMan! can be used to manage a lot more kits and tools such as Maven. In this blog post however, we see how to use SDKMan! to effortlessly manage different versions of Java on the same machine. 

Payara Engineering have recently released Payara Server Community 6 Alpha 3 and Payara Server Community 6 Alpha 4 as major milestones on the road to full Jakarta EE 10 support.

In this blog, we will explore what these releases can do and how you can use them to help in your migration to Payara 6 and Jakarta EE 10.

Jakarta EE 10 will be released on September 22! It's almost here...

While the previous releases of Jakarta EE have been focussed on the much-feared namespace change and updating everything with support for Java 11, this is the first major release of Jakarta EE to start introducing new features for developers to use. I’ll cover some of them here.

The next Java Long Term Support (LTS) version, Java 17, has been released.  We thought this would be a good time to give you a short refresher on the Java versioning and why Payara Platform only runs on LTS versions.

The world is moving in fast forward and the Java ecosystem is no exception. In 2017, the release of Java 9 disrupted the Java ecosystem with the introduction of Java modules. Soon after, the new six months Java release cycle caused another disruption, with three new Java major versions released since then. The Payara team have been working hard to keep up with this new, faster velocity. Although the latest Payara Server version 5.191 doesn’t run on Java 11 yet, we’re very close and can confidently say the next version of Payara Server will run on Java 11.