What's New in the Payara Platform November Release?

Published on 11 Nov 2020

Photo of Dominika Tasarz by Dominika Tasarz

We're happy to announce that Payara Platform Community 5.2020.6 (direct download here) and Payara Platform Enterprise 5.23.0 (request here) Editions are out !

With this major release of Payara Platform Enterprise, we're introducing OpenAPI Refactor and some further improvements to Payara InSight.  Meanwhile, the Payara Community Edition adds support for Payara Micro in the Eclipse IDE and a number of useful MicroProfile enhancements.

Read more below to find out the details, and don't miss our Release Overview virtual event next week, which is now open for registrations on Meetup here. 

 Payara Platform Download Here 

Payara InSight Improvements in Payara Server Enterprise 

Following the first release of Payara Insight into Payara Platform Enterprise Edition last month (find out more here) , further quality of life improvements have been added, including an overhaul of the main content Data Widget and the creation of a unified Alert Centre. More information will be coming soon in a dedicated blog post, so watch this space! 

Open API Refactor in Payara Platform Enterprise

In this Payara Platform Enterprise release we added a stable and secure version of the MicroProfile OpenAPI implementation - the one we already provided in Payara Platform Community 5.2020.3. The original blog, detailing some of these features, can be found here. 

The newly introduced changes to OpenAPI in Payara Platform Enterprise include:

  • Multi document definition support
  • Document processing improvements
  • OpenAPI scanner for packaged archive

Eclipse MicroProfile Enhancements in Payara Platform

  • MicroProfile Health Improvements

We’ve added the ability to monitor any metrics exposed in the Metrics API via Payara Health. We’ve also added the ability to expose any Payara Health checks to the MicroProfile Health API. This allows you to monitor a broader variety of metrics from Payara Health, and use these to inform smarter MicroProfile readiness checks.

  • MicroProfile Database Config Sources

We've added extra MicroProfile config sources to access SQL and DynamoDB databases. You can configure a ‘key’ and ‘value’ column name to fetch data from a selected table.

  • MicroProfile Cloud Vault Config Sources

We've added extra MicroProfile config sources to access data from the secrets managers of three cloud providers: GCP, AWS and Azure. This allows secure access keys to be stored in the cloud provider key vaults and accessed using the MicroProfile Config API. A good example of using this would be when configuring a MP REST Client to make a secure request.

Eclipse Payara Micro Support in Payara Platform Community

We are introducing support for Payara Micro in the Eclipse IDE starting with this release to create, debug, and deploy the Jakarta EE 8 web application to the Payara Micro Community and Enterprise editions.
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We are already providing the support for Payara Server Community and Enterprises Edition in the Eclipse IDE, with this release we will also support the Eclipse GlassFish 6.0.x.
 

Some more information on this enhancement will be published soon our blog so make sure you come back to check it out in the next few days!

Other Useful Improvements

  • Removing Expired Certificates During Domain Creation

A QoL feature, when creating a domain, the certificate and trust stores used by Payara Server are now cleared of expired certificates. As many of you know, Payara Server makes use of its own certificate stores rather than directly relying upon the JDK ones. During creation of a domain, these certificate stores get the default Payara certificates generated and added to them (e.g. the s1as certificate for the DAS), and also copies the entries from the JDK trust store. The cert stores themselves, however, are already pre-filled with some defaults which expire over time since they don't get overwritten by the newer certificates coming in from the JDK. These expired certificates should now be removed upon creation of a domain, saving you (and us!) some legwork in making sure that all of the trusted certificates in the cert store are valid. This feature applies to both Payara Server Community & Enterprise Editions. 

  • Marking Applications as "Unavailable" as Soon as They are Disabled

We've made some improvements to the undeployment process to help provide consistency. Depending on the size & complexity, as well as the frequency of requests coming through to it, it was possible for an application to continue responding in unexpected ways whilst being undeployed. This typically manifested itself as the application returning an empty response (with an error message in the logs) rather than a 404 or similar error message. We've added an extra step to the undeployment process which should help alleviate this by setting the application context as unavailable earlier than it did previously. This means that the application should now return a 503 "Service Unavailable" error message whilst being undeployed, before transitioning to returning a 404 "Not Found" after it has been removed. This improvement applies to the Payara Platform Community Edition and is planned for the Enterprise Edition in the next release.

Release Notes

The Enterprise Release (request here) includes 13 bug fixes, 5 improvements and 1 component upgrade; while the Community Release (direct download here) includes 5 new features, 5 bug fixes and 5 improvements.

See more detailed overview of the fixes and improvements in the Release Notes:

Download The Latest Payara Platform Release

Don't forget to update your Payara Platform to the new version! You can Download the Payara Community Edition here, or request the Payara Enterprise Edition via this form.

 Payara Platform Download Here 

As usual - if you have any questions, feedback or suggestions, please post them in the comments below or email us at community@payara.fish 

 

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