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.

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!

In the December Payara Platform Community release, we added two MicroProfile specification release candidates for you to try out: the MP Health 3.0 and MP JWT Auth 1.2 specifications. (Read more about that in this blog: Test MicroProfile Specs in Payara Platform Community 5.2020.7 Release). In our February Payara Platform Community release, support for MicroProfile 4.0 is complete with the final versions of the MicroProfile specifications, and we are now pending compatibility recognition from the Eclipse Foundation.

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.

This blog describes the issue we currently have within the Payara Platform products when you try to combine the MicroProfile Rest Client specification and MicroProfile Fault Tolerance and provides a solution.

Payara is pleased to announce that we have joined the MicroProfile Working Group. This builds on our commitment to shaping and improving Enterprise Java for both microservices and monolithic architectures. 

The MicroProfile project was born as a community initiative to optimise Enterprise Java with a microservices standard platform. It joined theEclipse Foundation in 2017, an independent open source software association, with the goal of driving innovation with a vendor-neutral "incubation" environment.

The Eclipse Foundation's MicroProfile Working Group encourages collaboration between participants, working in short cycles to propose and gain approval for new common APIs and functionality - and in turn drawing on the knowledge of a wide variety of different vendors. As one of the contributors, Payara engineers will shape and drive the future of the MicroProfile specifications.

We talked to our Founder and CEO Steve Millidge to find out more about what this means. 

As MicroProfile moves toward the 4.0 final release, the Payara team has simultaneously been working to ready the Payara Platform for MicroProfile 4.0 compatibility. One of the goals of the Payara Platform Community Edition is to evolve rapidly and provide a place for developers to test new features and capabilities as soon as they are available. In the Payara Platform Community 5.2020.7 Release, you can give two of the MicroProfile specification release candidates a try: MP Health 3.0 and MP JWT Auth 1.2.

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.

Writing microservices within Jakarta EE is technically possible, but you miss a few goodies for the distributed environment you are running in.

MicroProfile wants to optimize your Enterprise Java application by creating Java standards which link to some well known CloudNative standards like etcd for Configuration, OpenTracing and Jaeger for Distributed Tracing and Prometheus for Metrics.

In this talk, delivered by Payara's Rudy De Busscher at EclipseCon, he goes over some basic concepts of the MicroProfile specifications and show you through various demos how the integration with those tools can be done easily.