March 2023 Payara Platform Release: Payara 6 Enterprise!

Originally published on 30 Mar 2023
Last updated on 12 Apr 2023

A lot. Hot out of the Payara engineering furnace, we bring you the latest Payara Platform Community and Enterprise releases for the month of March 2023. Payara Platform Enterprise 6.0 gives you a production optimized and commercially supported runtime for your mission-critical projects, combining our top-rated support and 10 year software lifecycle with the very latest version of Jakarta EE.

Payara Platform Community 6.2023.3 is out with 4 improvements, 6 bug fixes and 3 component upgrades. Payara Platform Enterprise 5.49.0 also comes with 4 bug fixes, 3 component upgrades and 1 improvement.

Payara 6 Enterprise Is Here!

You now use Jakarta EE 10 and MicroProfile 6 with a fully supported, production-ready version of Payara Platform!

Try it out with our free trial:

This is because the March release brings Payara Platform Enterprise 6.0, a major release of the commercially supported, fully optimised, production readyJakarta EEandMicroProfileruntime. Payara Enterprise 6 features out of the box support forJakarta EE 10and Eclipse MicroProfile 6.

Payara 6 Enterprise comes with a 10-year software lifecycle - you can guarantee you will not have to upgrade in a year or two to continue receiving updates and fixes. You can now get all the benefits of Jakarta EE 10 with a platform that is suitable for mission critical projects.

In keeping with our commitment to providing a first class deployment runtime for Jakarta EE and MicroProfile applications, Payara Platform Enterprise 6.0 also comes with 3 improvements, 5 bug fixes, a component upgrade and a security fix. We havea dedicated bloganswering all your questions about this new major release of our Enterprise offering.

Notable Changes

The most notable change for this release cycle is support for Jakarta EE 10 and MicroProfile 6 in Payara Platform Enterprise. Payara Platform Community also now supports MicroProfile 6.

Breaking Changes

As noted above, both Payara Platform Enterprise 6.0 and Payara Platform Community 6.2023.3 ship with MicroProfile 6 support, and that means breaking changes, as noted inthis release announcementof MicroProfile, and worth taking a look at. Both releases also now require JDK 11.0.12 as the minimum JDK to run.

For Payara 6 Enterprise, support for Jakarta EE 10 means you must be aware of the changes that come along with that release. Jakarta EE 10 is a major release with backwards incompatible changes, the major one being the javax to jakarta package refactoring. This major change affects all Jakarta EE 8 and below applications.

For Payara Enterprise 4 and 5 users (with applications written in Java EE 7/8, Jakarta EE 8), this means Payara Enterprise 6 is a major breaking change release. If you are a current customer on Payara 5 Enterprise (Java EE/Jakarta EE 8), even though you can currently deploy your Jakarta EE 8 applications on Payara Enterprise 6, we are working on an upgrade adviser tool that will point you to places that may require manual intervention during the upgrade process. This will be out very soon.

Given the massive scope of changes that came with Jakarta EE 10 (the javax to jakarta package refactoring, change in default CDI behavior, removal of some methods, etc), we are committed to making the upgrade to Payara Enterprise 6 (and thus Jakarta EE 10) from Payara Enterprise 5 as seamless as possible, and thus our investment in this ancillary tool.

If you are currently on Payara Enterprise 4 (Java EE 7 and below), we encourage you to first upgrade to Payara Enterprise 5 as a first step in your application modernization strategy and eventual migration to Payara Enterprise 6.

You can find key changes of the Jakarta EE 10 release detailed inthis blog post,inour guide on the subjectand by webinar series.

Payara Enterprise = Choose Between Jakarta EE 10 and Earlier Versions

You might notice that Payara Enterprise is getting two releases this month: Payara Platform Enterprise 5.49 and Payara Platform Enterprise 6.0. The table below shows the options available to you given the current version of Jakarta EE your application is developed with.

Jakarta EE Version	Payara Platform Version To Choose	Comments
Java EE 7 and below	Payara Enterprise 4	This is a step to prepping for upgrades and modernization of your application.
Java EE 8 or Jakarta EE 8	Payara Enterprise 5
Jakarta EE 10	Payara Enterprise 6

As stated above, we are actively working on automatic advisor tooling that will point out to you which parts of your application will require manual change as part of the automated upgrade process. Stay tuned for the announcement.