One of the Payara Platform features people like most is flexibility for how it can run applications and services and connect them to each other. You can run applications on Payara Server, Payara Micro, and cluster them all together in the same Domain Data Grid, while using the same technology for building the applications and the samefeatures in both Payara Platform runtimes. A lot of our customers take advantage of this flexibility and some even take to the extreme, as described below.

When commercial support for GlassFish ended in 2014, Payara Server was created from the open source code as a fully supported drop-in replacement for GlassFish.  

Payara Services was born in 2016 to offer support solutions for Payara Server. By 2017, Payara Services had joined The Eclipse Foundation and the Payara Platform expanded to include Payara Micro and comprehensive commercial support options for development projects, in-production support, and consultancy solutions.  New product features and the development of the Payara Platform evolves and is improved upon with each monthly release, and while the application server was originally derived from GlassFish and shares many similarities - the two products are not the same. 

In January 2021 we introduced the Upgrade Tool as a minimally viable product (MVP) for Payara Server Enterprise users to make the process of upgrading from one version of Payara Server Enterprise to the next faster and easier.  Each release since then has offered improvements to the tool. 

The March Payara Platform Enterprise Edition release (request here) includes 3 bug fixes, 4 improvements, and 7 additional MicroProfile Config Sources. You can see a more detailed overview of the fixes, improvements, and new features included in Payara Platform Enterprise Edition 5.26.0 in the Release Notes here.

Configuration of applications should not be done within the application itself, but externally. We’ve expanded the sources from where the configuration values could be read to support third-party configuration services and cloud providers in the March Payara Enterprise release:

The Payara Enterprise Release 5.22.0 in October 2020 was the first Payara Enterprise release to include our fully integrated and greatly improved real-time monitoring and alerting solution called Payara InSight (formerly known as Payara Monitoring Console in Payara Community).

Then in the November 2020,release, we made improvements in how alerts are represented in the user interface, the display of widget content, and configuration options.

For December’s Payara Enterprise 5.21.1 (patch release), we’ve continued to make improvements that make Payara InSight easier to use. Updates include slight changes to the GUI for consistency and warning awareness, improvements in the flow of creating new pages, and improvements to the process of updating or changing a previously created Watch.

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.

Payara Platform Enterprise users will be pleased to hear that we released a refactor of the MicroProfile OpenAPI implementation we provide in Payara Platform Community 5.2020.3 with the aim of addressing a number of issues and requests that had been raised over time. The original blog, detailing some of these features, can be found here. 

OpenAPI Refactor has now been included in the Payara Platform Enterprise 5.23.0 release.

In Payara Server Enterprise 5.23 we continued improving our monitoring solution released in Payara Server Enterprise 5.22.0 (read about it here) called Payara InSight. The main focus of improvements for this release is the representation of alerts in the user interface. We also had a closer look at how widget content is arranged and coloured which also lead us to add further configuration options.

Payara Tools for IntelliJ IDEA:

Payara IntelliJ IDEA tool's initial release is out and available on the JetBrains Marketplace and Payara Enterprise repository. Payara IntelliJ IDEA tools provide integration of the Payara Platform Enterprise & Community Editions into the IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate.

Introduction

The Payara Enterprise Release 5.22.0 is the first Payara Enterprise release to include our fully integrated and greatly improved real-time monitoring and alerting solution called Payara InSight (formerly known as Payara Monitoring Console in Payara Community).