What’s New in the Payara Platform December Release?

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The last Payara Platform release of 2020 is here!  With this patch release of Payara Platform Enterprise 5.23.1, we’re introducing more improvements and component upgrades to Payara InSight as well as a couple useful bug fixes. Meanwhile, the Payara Platform Community 5.2020.7 introduces some improvements and additions to the MicroProfile specs in preparation for the upcoming MicroProfile 4.0 release. We are also happy to confirm that Payara Platform Web Profile is now Jakarta EE 8 compatible!

You can download Payara Platform Community 5.2020.7 here and request Payara Platform Enterprise 5.23.1 here. 

Read more below to find out the details.

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Further Payara InSight Improvements in Payara Platform Enterprise

Back in October, we introduced Payara InSight – an improved and production-ready version of  the Monitoring Console, available only in Payara Platform Enterprise (check out the Payara InSight demo here).

In Payara Platform Enterprise 5.23.1 release, we continued to make improvements that make Payara InSight easier to use. Updates include slight changes to the GUI for consistency and warning awareness, improvements in the flow of creating new pages, and improvements to the process of updating or changing a previously created Watch. 

More details on Payara InSight improvements are coming soon in a separate blog post, so watch this space!

New MicroProfile Specs in Payara Platform Community

As part of our work to make Payara Platform compatible with the upcoming MicroProfile 4.0,  we’ve introduced two of the MicroProfile specification release candidates for you to try – MP Health 3.0 and MP JWT Auth 1.2. 
 
The list of changes occurring in MicroProfile Health 3.0 compared to 2.2 include breaking changes. You can view a summary of thechanges to MP Health 3.0 here. Changes occurring in MicroProfile JWT 1.2 are minor. See a summary of MP JWT 1.2 changes here.

 

Improved Deployment Performance with a MicroProfile Sniffer and Engine in Payara Platform Community 

In previous versions of Payara Platform Community, all MicroProfile specifications were launched when deploying an application – even if you weren’t using the specification. To improve deployment performance and efficiency, we’ve now created a MicroProfile Sniffer and Engine.

What’s the MicroProfile Sniffer and Engine in the Payara Platform?

Similar to a trained service dog increasing the efficiency of a search and rescue team using their powerful noses to “sniff” out and locate missing people, the MicroProfile Sniffer and Engine discovers which MicroProfile specifications you’re using with the Payara Platform and only deploys those. The Sniffer and Engine increases efficiency by only deploying the specifications you use, rather than deploying all of them.

Payara Platform Web Profile is Now Jakarta EE 8 Compatible!

Payara Server Web Profile has passed the approximately 18,000 open sourced licensed Jakarta EE 8 Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs) for the Web Profile Platform and is now a Jakarta EE 8 Web Profile compatible implementation! 

You can find out more in the blog post here.

Other Changes & Improvements

  • Payara Platform now works with LDAP. If you are a MicroProfile user, this should be helpful if you want to fetch secure data for your application.
  • In the November release of Payara Platform Community, we added new MicroProfile Config sources for the cloud, to allow fetching secure configuration data from each cloud provider. The newly added Hashicorp Vault is a vendor neutral service that can be deployed to any of the cloud providers, and will help you store and access secure data similarly to each of the options provided by each cloud vendor.

  • We added one important security fix to Payara Platform Community – Hibernate Validator 6.1.2.Final contained a vulnerability that allowed remote code execution when using a custom validator that doesn’t sanitise user input. The vulnerability report can be found here: NVD – CVE-2020-10693 (nist.gov), with some more background here: Hibernate Validator 6.1.5.Final and 6.0.20.Final released – In Relation To.


  • We removed production domain from Payara Server Community Edition, as Payara Platform Community is not meant to be used in production environments. If you’d like to benefit from all production-ready features of Payara Platform, reach out to ask to request Payara Platform Enterprise 
  • We’ve had plenty of valuable community contributions to Payara Platform in the recent weeks, including MicroProfile, security and other various fixes. Shout out to Lukáš Kvídera, Alexander Pinchuk and bjetal – thank you for your help and support!

Release Notes

The Enterprise Release (request here) includes 8 bug fixes, 8 improvements and 1 component upgrade; while the Community Release (direct download here) includes 4 new features, 10 bug fixes, 4 improvements and 1 security fix. 

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.

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Community Online Event: December Release Overview and Jakarta EE 9

On December 8, we held a webinar where Rudy De Busscher covered recent updates and enhancements to the Payara Platform in this latest release, as well as answering community questions. 

The event also involved a discussion about the exciting new release of Jakarta EE 9, how this relates to Payara and how you can use the Transformer Configuration Option to easily migrate.

Please find the video 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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  1. Derek Lauro

    ‘Removed Production Domain from Community’ – You’re killing me. That’s not “bloat”, it’s a useful domain and it’s only 2.65MB – You’re just pushing users to buy Enterprise.

    1. Steve Millidge

      This isn’t really a push to buy Enterprise. This is really a consequence of changing the packaging of the binary community distribution.

      The goal of the Payara community team is to focus on developing and innovating in creating the core Jakarta EE/MicroProfile compatible runtime and therefore the community team are stripping down some of the pieces from the core binary distribution (and the build) and moving them out of the core packaged community binary. This also includes a number of the notifiers and other connectors as time goes by. This doesn’t mean these things have gone away. The Payara Platform is open-source and therefore the production domain will live in the source code here Payara/appserver/admin/production_domain_template at master · payara/Payara (github.com) and you are free to build it and add back to your domain. The production domain template will evolve as time goes by. As the PR says FISH-375 Remove Production Domain From Build by MattGill98 · Pull Request #4990 · payara/Payara (github.com) this is just a matter of moving the jar out of the build packaging.

      There is a constant tension between making the distribution small and fast and packaging all the pieces that people may need. We are striving to make the Payara community platform more and more modular so you can pick and choose which pieces you need. Jakarta EE servers in general are constantly berated for being “bloated” we are trying to disprove this fact. People will still be able to add additional components to their domains.

      The reason the domain remains in Enterprise is because Enterprise has a much more conservative release cycle and needs to maintain backwards compatible across many versions.

      Steve

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