JDK 17 is the latest Long Term Supported (LTS) version of the Java platform, released in September 2021. LTS versions will have regular releases for the coming years and you don't need to switch to a newer version after 6 months as you do with those 'interim' JDK versions.

The features in an LTS version are kept stable so it is ideal for running  your enterprise applications. Once you switch to an LTS, you can safely update to any minor release to accommodate for security issues and bug fixes of the JDK platform, but without needing to perform a migration.

With the release of the November 2021 version of the Payara Platform Community Edition, Payara Server, Payara Micro, and the Web Profile run on JDK 17 platform.

Before your application can respond to any request from the user, Payara Server needs to be started as a process on a machine. The Payara Server Domain instance or a Payara instance can be started using the Asadmin CLI tool.

But in many cases when you run Payara Server on an on-premise machine or in a virtual machine, you want to start the Payara process automatically when the machine is booted. You can do this by defining Payara as a Service on the machine.

The November 2021 Payara Platform release is here!  Payara Platform Enterprise 5.33.0 includes 4 improvements, 4 bug fixes, and 2 component upgrades. The Payara Platform Community 5.2021.9 release offers 11 improvements, 6 bug fixes, and 11 component upgrades. 

A realm is the security policy domain within an application server. It defines how the authentication and authorization for your application is performed. Most of the time, your application is used by a person that can provide username and passwords as credentials (directly or indirectly through providers like an OpenId Connect provider) but some use cases exist where another process needs to use your endpoints.

Data is sent to and received from the endpoints within Payara Platform. When large chunks of data are sent to the client in response to a request, it might be an option to compress the data when the bandwidth is limited.  This speeds up the transfer, but requires more CPU on the server and the client to perform the compression and handle the response.

With the October 2021 release, the Payara Platform allows configuring the compression level and the compression algorithm so you can better tune your environment for your requirements.

The Client Certificates security extensions continue to receive improvements in this release. In previous releases (July and September 2021) we added Client Certificate Authentication improvements, giving the ability to define multiple TrustStores and implement a SPI to allow developers to perform additional checks on the Client Certificate.

Previously, any Client Certificate that is used and matched within the KeyStore was accepted, even when the certificate was expired. Starting in the October 2021 releases (Payara Community 5.2021.8 and Payara Enterprise 5.32.0), using the newly developed SPI, we have implemented an additional check when using the Client Certificate authentication option to ensure the certificate is valid.

The October 2021 Payara Platform release is here!  Payara Platform Enterprise 5.32.0 includes 8 improvements, 9 bug fixes, 1 security fix, and 5 component upgrades. The Payara Platform Community 5.2021.8 release offers 7 improvements, 7 bug fixes, 1 security fix, and 5 component upgrades. 

You can download Payara Platform Community 5.2021.8here and request Payara Platform Enterprise 5.32.0 here. 

And don't forget to join the 'October Release Overview + Client Certificate Authentication and Security Realms in Payara' webinar with Rudy De Busscher on October 26th 2021 3 PM BST.  Find out more & registerhere.

We also invite you to participate in the Payara Platform Survey- for your chance to win one of two $25 Amazon vouchers. The survey is mostly multiple choice and takes about 6 minutes to complete. Thank you!

Read more below to learn more about the highlights of this release.

As a proud open-source business, we value the contributions of our community of users - driving the Payara Platform forward and shaping its development. 

Users can suggest and make improvements or bug fixes by issuing a pull request on GitHub. We then reward our contributors with Payara 'swag' - t-shirts, stickers and pens! 

SSL certificates are used for several features within Payara Server. You can configure your custom certificate for the TLS based connections the Payara Server is serving when using a custom domain name. And those certificates can be used for authentication purposes to identify the caller, mainly in a machine to machine communication.

With the July and September 2021 Payara Server releases, we have implemented two new features to improve the usage of these custom SSL certificates.

The September 2021 Payara Platform release is here!  Both Payara Platform Enterprise and Payara Platform Community Editions include a security fix that requires you to take action to ensure the security of your environment. (Explained below).

Payara Platform Enterprise 5.31.0 and Payara Platform Community 5.2021.7 releases each contain 10 bug fixes, 1 component upgrade, 1 security fix and 1 new feature. 

You can download Payara Platform Community 5.2021.7 here and request Payara Platform Enterprise 5.31.0 here. 

Read more below to learn more about the highlights of this release.