Earlier this week, we were offically presented our2021 Queen's Award for Enterprise- International Trade - trophy, in a ceremony held at Malvern Hills Science Park. TheQueen's Awardis signed by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 2nd and Prime Minister Boris Johnson. 

Read more below, and find a round-up of news coverage! 

Our CEO and FounderSteve Millidge is a guest on the WaterWorks podcast, the technology discussion podcast run by journalist and authorJohn K. Waters. 

Waters is the editor in chief of theConverge360 news and information sites Application Development Trends(ADT Mag), Pure AI, and Futuretech360 - with his career also including writing books, including "The Everything Guide to Social Media," one of the first deep dives into this world-changing phenomenon, and "Blobitecture," an exploration of an architectural and industrial design trend enabled by computer software. He also co-scripted the documentary film "Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance," which aired on PBS.

Steve had a conversation over Zoom with John. Steve - in Malvern, England, after work - spoke to John - in his Silicon Valley office just before 9am. Their discussion was wide-ranging and insightful, covering everything from the future of Jakarta EE and how it will fare under Eclipse Foundation stewardship, to the specifics of Payara's journey and how we got our marine logo! It's a must listen for those interested in open source and Enterprise Java. 

We're hiring for a range of roles this August! 

Wherever you are in the world, you can come and work for our rapidly-growing, expert team. We are a proudly 'remote-first' company -here'sour Talent Acquisition Lead Mag Dutka explaining what this means. As a result, in all but one of the roles we are welcoming applications from any country in the world. 

A key role we are recruiting for isSoftware Engineering Manager. You will be leading a team of world-class Java / Jakarta EE developers to deliver regular releases of both ourCommunity andEnterprise products to meet product roadmap objectives. 

For all of our engineering roles, we'd love to see applications from those who have worked with us before - whether that's partnering in events orcontributing via GitHub. 

And don't think that you need Java coding skills to join us! It takes a vast range of HR, Marketing, Design, and Operations skills to power an award-winning, multi-talented and energised team - in this round of recruitment, for example, we are also looking for a Head of Marketing! 

Payara Platform is an open source middleware platform. This means that we are proud to nurture and grow an open and collaborative community, building on the needs of all to advance our software. 

Part of this ethos is inviting contributions to our software via our GitHub. Users can issue a pull request with suggested bug fixes and enhancements, and if successful, these will incorporated in our next release. We send t-shirts and stickers to contributors to say thank you! 

Since our last contributor shout out in February, we've implemented many useful pull requests, from valued long time contributors Alexander Pinchuk and Oliver Bertuch, as well as new contributorAngelTG2.

We also wanted to take the opportunity to point out that contributions aren't the only way to shape the future of Payara Platform. You can also up or down vote the open issues - new features, enhancements and bug fixes - that would make the most positive difference to YOUR development and applications. Find out more below. 

In what’s been a strange start to the year, a silver lining is the growth of innovative communities, with people pushing themselves to build something valuable together - making use of a time when the majority of us are in lockdown. At Payara Services, this has taken the form of an uptake in contributors to the Payara Platform open source project - and it’s time to say a huge thank you! 

The Payara Platform Community versions are open source runtimes for development projects and containerized Jakarta EE and MicroProfile. This means we welcome contributions through GitHub from developers looking to shape the future of Enterprise Java - whether to Payara Server Community, supporting Jakarta EE in any environment; or Payara Micro Community, which is lightweight to suit containerized Jakarta EE deployments.

Since our end of year Contributor shout-out, we’ve seen some fantastic pull requests on our GitHub, that have since been incorporated into this latest February release. 

Payara Services team members have worked with Payara Platform users to create the very best innovations, leading to mutual learning and development - and most importantly, ensuring that Payara Platform remains innovative, creative and agile. 

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.

We recently held our regular monthly online event hosted by Rudy De Busscher to discuss the recent updates and enhancements to the Payara Platform in the latest release. For this months theme we also had a community discussion about the monitoring tools available in the Payara Platform, and our future plans.

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.

New in the Payara Server 5.2020.4 release (August 2020), RMI calls to an EJB hosted on Payara Server from a Java SE client will now have the active Span Context automatically propagated to the server, with a counterpart server-side span being created as a child of this client call. This fills in a gap in our existing Request Tracing service, and comes with the added benefit of allowing a user to propagate key:value pairs from a Java SE client to Payara Server (or simply from server to server) in a request as OpenTracing baggage items - of particular interest to those who utilise Context Propagation or similar features in other application servers.

Recently we rebranded the Community and Enterprise Editions of the Payara Platform to clarify and strengthen the differences between our Community software and our Enterprise subscriptions for customers.