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!

One of the cornerstones of any modern Payara Platform architecture is the use of the Domain Data Grid. The Domain Data Grid allows multiple Payara Server or Payara Micro instances to join and form a robust cluster of interchangeable nodes that can share data between each other and grant High Availability and Failover capabilities to any applications deployed in the cluster. 

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. 

There is a lot of interest in the server-side Java community around using ahead of time (AOT) native compilation provided by Graal Substrate VM to drive down memory usage and cold start times of Java microservices. While these frameworks are technically interesting, the claim is if you spend time rewriting your Jakarta EE applications to utilise these new frameworks, then you will substantially reduce your cloud operational costs. First, by enabling the adoption of a serverless deployment model and second by reducing your containers' memory usage. 

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.

What happens when an application designed for a small user base needs to be scaled up and moved to the cloud?

It needs to live in a distributed environment: responding to an appropriate number of concurrent user requests per second and ensuring users find the application reliable. 

Though Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile can help with reliable clustering, there is no standard API in Jakarta EE that defines how clustering should work currently. This might change in the future, but in the meantime, this gap must be filled by DevOps engineers.

In this blog, we will cover 10 technical strategies to deal with clustering challenges when developing Jakarta EE and MicroProfile for cloud environments.

The Payara Server Community 5.2020.6 release introduces a host of new enhancements to Eclipse MicroProfile, with MicroProfile Config containing most of these improvements. MicroProfile Config now comes with five new config sources for cloud key vaults and databases. The Payara Health Check Service has also been updated to monitor any Metrics exposed in the MicroProfile Metric, and it can now expose any HealthCheck checkers to the MicroProfile Health REST endpoints.

All companies are software companies, and businesses will always experience the challenge of keeping integrations between users and applications scalable, productive, fast, and of high quality. To combat this, cloud, microservices, and other modern solutions come up more and more in architectural decisions.

Here is the question: Is Java prepared to deal with these diverse concepts in a corporate environment?

Yes, and to demonstrate how Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile work very well and in the cloud, the Payara and Platform.sh will work together on this webinar. Watch and make your conclusions.

In this short video Rudy de Busscher demonstrates how to use MicroProfile OpenTracing with Jaeger in combination with Payara Micro.