What's new in Payara Server & Payara Micro 174?

Originally published on 15 Nov 2017
Last updated on 15 Nov 2017

Our last release of 2017 - Payara Server/Micro 4.1.2.174 - is now available for download! The final public release for this year contains over 100 bug fixes, 5 new features and 18 improvements including Soteria support, full MBean integration via the JMX Monitoring Service and wider support for environment variable substitution. Check out the full release notes, or read on for a short summary of 174's major features.

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Soteria Support

The most eye-catching new feature in 174 is support for the new Security API, Soteria. We have now added it as an additional API to Payara Server 4. The Security API simplifies the addition of security to an application by adding support for Authentication Mechanisms and Identity Stores amongst other things.

The API adds new annotations such as @BasicAuthenticationMechanismDefinition

and @DatabaseIdentityStoreDefinition, which greatly improves the authentication process. Users can now take advantage of these features and others included in the Security API.

JMX Monitoring Service Notifications

JMX Monitoring has been integrated with the notification service in both Payara Server and Payara Micro. This is a powerful monitoring addition, which allows you to remotely monitor MBeans containing data from the current server to open database connections and send the resulting notifications via email, XMPP, or one of the many other notifiers. For a full list of all the MBeans available in Payara Server and Micro, see the documentation.

MicroProfile Config

The implementation of MicroProfile Config has been upgraded to version 1.1, as part of our continuing support for MicroProfile. This adds support for primitive and URL types, to make it easier for developers using MicroServices to use the Config API out of the box. With Payara Micro, this now means that your microservices are now more portable than ever before. To find out more about what you can do with MicroProfile Config, see the MicroProfile 1.1 release notes.

Environment Variable Substitution

Environment variables substitution now also work in pre and post boot command files. This is great for running Payara Server in Docker, meaning that you can pass variables directly in the dockerfile rather than as a separate script.

Coloured Terminal Output

Payara Micro now features ANSI coloured output in the the terminal to clearly show the level of everything that is being logged, meaning that WARNING and SEVERE notifications can no longer speed by:

Bug Fixes

Finally, with 106 Payara and GlassFish bugs squashed, the 174 release contains the most bug fixes of any Payara Server release to date! If you find any more bugs, please raise an issue on GitHub so we can beat this record again in 181.

Component Upgrades

And finally, some component upgrades featured in this release:

libpam4j to v1.8
Apache Commons IO to 2.5
Open MQ to 5.1.1.final
Weld to 2.4.5
Pfl to 4.0.1
Hazelcast to 3.8.5