What's New in Payara Platform 191?

A change in the year means a change in our version number! Slightly later than our usual release month of February, we've tried to include some more changes in the release than a simple number change to make the wait worthwhile: read on to find out more!

Return of the Help Docs

With GlassFish being donated to the Eclipse Foundation with the rest of Java EE (if you weren't aware of this, well, Oracle have done that!), they also donated the help documentation. We previously had to remove these for licensing reasons, but with their donation we can actually use them and start updating them again!

EJB Remoting Improvements

To help out those trying to use EJBs in containerised and NAT/VPN environments, we've begun doing some improvements to EJB remoting. This release brings the first fruits of these labours, allowing users to invoke EJBs by hitting a JAX-RS endpoint, and providing usage of a thin client to do so with.

MicroProfile 2.1

MicroProfile 2.1 updates OpenTracing to 1.2, bringing with it skip patterns, operation name providers, and a couple of extra usability improvements such as no longer tracing the other MicroProfile endpoints (e.g. /health).

We've gone a step further than this though and (sort of) implemented OpenTracing 1.3 to prepare us for our inevitable support of MicroProfile 2.2! OpenTracing 1.3 brings instrumentation options for MicroProfile Rest Clients. It's worth noting that we don't support Rest-Client 1.2 in this release (even though that's what OpenTracing 1.3 is targeted at), which is why I clarified my implementation statement with "sort of"; OpenTracing 1.3 doesn't rely on Rest Client 1.2 features, so we can still instrument the clients without supporting the spec required version.

Payara Micro Context Roots

A long sorely missing feature of Payara Micro was the ability to define the context root of an application from the command line; well suffer in mild annoyance no longer! We've finally got round to introducing this oft-requested feature, and we should have another blog demonstrating how this works shortly (if it isn't already out!).

Numerous Bug Fixes

We continue on our quest to eradicate all bugs, with this release bringing with it roughly forty fixes. Some of the notable ones of these are a fix for viewing remote instance monitoring information, some HTTP2 fixes (including a memory leak!), variable substitution not working for Payara Micro post-boot files, and making it so the interactive asadmin prompt doesn't barf and die when it prompts you for extra command parameters.

Thank You for Community Contributions

We've had a number of community contributions added to this release of Payara Platform - always welcome! Anthonyvdotbe provided a couple of small fixes around typos and line endings, while Svendiedrichsen implemented some under the covers improvements to the code base, such as some optimisations to logging and an improvement to our internal executor service (they've also been helping out with our PR reviews - which is much appreciated!).

Download the Payara Platform

That's all for this blog folks! Obviously this isn't all that was in the release - check the release notes if you want all the juicy details. I would also be remiss if I didn't encourage you to try it out! Our download links should have been updated, allowing you to access it from all the usual places, but to save you precious brain cells and mouse clicks, here's a download link:

As always, you can contact us via the usual methods: Twitter, GitHub, our forum, and our website.