(Guest blog)

Both Payara Server and Payara Micro can cluster together and share data using Hazelcast. Out-of-the-box, there is no configuration needed, since Hazelcast uses multicast to discover and join other cluster members. However, when running in cloud environments like AWS, for example, there are a lot of things which can stop discovery being quite so straightforward. The key thing is that Multicast is not available, meaning another discovery strategy is needed; the most common generic alternative is to use TCP, but this assumes that you know at least the intended subnet that your cluster members will be in ahead of time.

Do you still think that Java EE is heavy-weight, cumbersome and doesn’t keep up with modern trends? I’ll show you that there are already production-ready enterprise and open source solutions to bring more flexibility than the traditional Java EE servers from the past. They strive to provide lightweight and extensible runtimes to power microservices, cloud deployments and reactive architectures already. Their individual efforts are naturally followed by an open collaboration within the MicroProfile project.

We’re very excited to announce our new Payara Team member - Kenji Hasunuma - who joined us at the beginning of November! If you've been an active Java EE & Payara community member in Japan I'm sure you recongnize his name :) 

Read along to find out more about Kenji and what he’ll be working on at Payara.

Didn't get a chance to attend JavaOne 2017 earlier this month? You can now watch some of the conference talks online! See below for our selection of the most interesting and useful presentations about Java EE.

All JavaOne 2017 recorded talks can be found on the Oracle Java YouTube channel.

One of the core steps in every continuous integration process is running integration tests for your application. Unlike vanilla unit tests, integration tests allow you to assess the state of your applications or systems by testing all of its components together (modules, databases, messaging, etc.) and verifying that they work correctly as a whole unit. Needless to say, integration tests are more complex that simple unit tests, have a larger footprint, take more time and are usually saved to test full releases or major changes to implementations.

Just a little over a year ago, the MicroProfile initiative was born. The community first heard about it at the DevNation conference in San Francisco on the 27th June last year. During the keynote panel, the five founding members (Red Hat, IBM, Tomitribe, LJC, and Payara) announced their collaboration and their main goal - to make it easier for developers to use familiar Java EE technologies and APIs for building microservice applications.

Have you ever wondered how you can improve the performance of your applications under high load? You've probably heard that reactive design can help meet better response time and make your applications more flexible. In this presentation, I will show that you don’t need to rewrite your Java EE applications from scratch to achieve that!

In the official announcement published on the Aquarium blog today, Oracle revealed that it seriously considers moving Java EE to an open source foundation.

Since Java EE 6 it's possible to define data sources in a portable way.

This does mean though that the data source is embedded in the application archive. For some use cases, this is exactly what's needed, but for others it may not be ideal.