One of the biggest challenges when developing applications for the web is understanding how applications need to be fine-tuned when releasing them into a production environment. This is no exception for Java Enterprise applications deployed on Payara Server.

Another quarter, another release! After an eventful 2016, November brings with it the final release of the year for Payara Server. This year, we've seen new services like Request Tracing and Health Check added, as well as the Slow SQL logger and SQL Trace Listeners. Revisiting the version of the documentation from 1 year ago and comparing the amount we have added since then is, frankly, astonishing!

Despite a bumper year for both new features and bug fixes, work continues apace! Below is a short summary of some of the things to look out for in a release that caps an incredible 12 months.

TIP: Don't deploy any apps to the DAS in production!

Why?

As is the case with all my stories, this one began at a customer site. They had an old app they were migrating from GlassFish 3.1.2 to the latest version of Payara Blue. They'd called me in because they wanted to benchmark performance of the new version of Payara Blue on AIX against their existing GlassFish 3.1.2, also on AIX, as well as against a recent version of JBoss (I'm unsure of the version, though I know it was deployed on Windows).

Payara Micro is packed with most of the features and APIs that come with Payara Server Full Profile even though it doesn't entirely support whole Jakarta EE Full Profile. As an example, Payara Micro supports persistent EJB Timers, which are only required by the Jakarta EE Full Profile and not by the Web Profile. In Payara Micro, it's possible to use persistent EJB Timers, which are stored across your micro instances inside the distributed data grid as long as at least one instance in the data grid is up and running.

Payara Server 163 is about to be released in a couple of days, as usual with many improvements and bug fixes. Although it cannot match the previous release in the number of new features, the list of improvements and fixes in Payara Server 163 is already longer than in the current release!

Recently, I was working with a customer on a production deployment of Payara Server and the topic of disaster recovery and backups arose. It seemed like a useful topic to blog about and share my thoughts with the community.

Once you have developed applications on Payara Server and moved these applications into a production environment, control will pass over to your Operations Teams. This guide will introduce some features of Payara Server that you may not know about, which are especially useful for the operations teams.

Taking an environment from development through to production is often an afterthought and can all too often be too far down the list of priorities. Initially, there may not be any obvious problems or issues with manually configuring a new production environment to match an existing one in development or test. As some customers I have visited have found, however, this will only lead to bigger and bigger inconsistency between platforms with ad-hoc changes causing different environments to diverge.

Opening our new Payara Updates video series, Mike Croft (@croft) - Payara Support Engineer – gives an overview of the Payara Server 161 Release Notes, highlighting a couple of great community contributions to this release. Mike also mentions some of our plans for the future update videos, so tune in if you want to find out more!

One of the lesser known features and key benefits of Payara Server is that it provides huge flexibility when architecting topologies for High Availability and Scalability. Utilising the embedded Hazelcast Data Grid for web session and JCache clustering brings the potential of many different topologies for scale out.