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.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) was introduced as a replacement for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). TLS is a cryptographic protocol which provides secure communication between a client and a server. It also provides a mechanism by which information is not tampered with, falsified or read by anyone other than the intended receiver. TLS 1.3 was released in August 2018 to replace the widely used TLS 1.2. TLS 1.3 comes with stronger cryptographic algorithms and brings in major improvements in performance, security and privacy, which will be discussed in this blog.

Java EE 8 introduced a new API called the Java EE Security API (see JSR 375) or "EE Security" in short.

This new API, perhaps unsurprisingly given its name, deals with security in Java EE.  Security in Java EE is obviously not a new thing though, and in various ways it has been part of the platform since its inception.

So what is exactly the difference between EE Security and the existing security facilities in Java EE? In this article we'll take a look at that exact question.

Wondering what the January 2019 changes to Oracle JDK mean for your business? Join Senior Payara Services Engineer, Fabio Turizo, for a short, informative webinar and get your questions answered!