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.