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.

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.

Payara Server works well with most IDEs, including four of the most commonly used IDEs for Jakarta EE developers: NetBeans, Eclipse IDE, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, and Visual Studio Code. Here's how to use each of the IDEs to create a Jakarta EE 8 Web App with Payara Server:

In this blog, we show you how to start your next Jakarta EE application with Visual Studio Code  using the plugin for the Payara Server.

We will create a Maven project so that you can also build it outside the IDE, such as in your CI environment, so you can automate your deployments.

When a user needs to access multiple applications in your environment, you should not require authentication for each application. If the user has already been authenticated for one of the applications, he or she should  should not be asked for credentials when he accesses one of the other applications during the same browser session. This concept is called Single Sign-on where the authentication credentials are 'shared' in the environment and can be used by any application in that environment.

Introduction

The Apache Maven Cargo Plugin allows you to deploy your application to a Payara Server, running locally or remotely. Using Maven as a build tool is an easy way to immediately deploy the application during the build to a test or production server.

We have created a custom version of the Cargo Plugin which also supports the Deployment Group feature of the Payara Server.

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 Platform 5 brought with it an implementation of Servlet 4.0, which itself contains support for the HTTP/2 standard. HTTP/2 support in Java has been fairly obscure for JDK 8 users, causing issues for many depending on their JDK minor version. This blog hopes to clarify the state of HTTP/2 in Payara Platform 5.

If you just want a quick answer to which Payara versions support HTTP/2 on which JDK version, jump ahead to Does Payara Server Support HTTP/2?

The runtime image of Payara Server consists of over 400 modules. Half of these do not come directly from the Payara codebase, but are various third-party APIs, their implementations and helper libraries. How do you choose the correct versions of your application's libraries so they are not in conflict with the ones in the server runtime?

As the recent June release (download here!) marks the first official release since splitting our product into two separate software editions, Payara Platform Enterprise and Payara Platform Community, you may notice the versioning has been updated.