As 2019 is in full swing, let's reflect on the highlights of improvements for the Payara Platform in 2018 and review the plans for enhancements and changes coming in 2019.

Watch our webinar with Q&A exploring our 2019 road map below

What Did We Deliver in 2018?

2018 was a big year for the Payara Platform. We achieved many of the things we planned for the year, and many additional things we hadn't foreseen. The highlight of 2018 was the release of Payara Server and Payara Micro 5 in February with our 5.181 release. Payara Platform 5 synchronised our state with upstream Eclipse GlassFish 5 and brought support for Java EE 8 applications. We introduced the new Domain Data Grid to simplify and enable greater flexibility in clustering, and delivered initial support for the emerging Eclipse MicroProfile APIs.

Throughout 2018 we tracked the MicroProfile APIs and delivered MicroProfile 2.0 support on both Payara Server and Payara Micro. Following customer needs in 2018, we focused heavily on delivering cloud and containerisation support to ensure Java EE developers can take advantage of new deployment architectures. The Domain Data Grid clusters seamlessly on many public cloud Infrastructure as a Service platforms and we have Kubernetes support for secrets and service discovery.

For the second half of the year the Payara team has also been involved in the migration of Java EE APIs to the Eclipse Foundation and the release of the first version Eclipse GlassFish as Java EE 8 certified. This sets us up nicely to lead the evolution of Jakarta EE 9 and the future of Enterprise Java.

Payara Platform Plans for 2019

After achieving so much last year we are really excited with our plans for the coming year. We have some key areas of focus for 2019:

Kubernetes and Docker

Driven by customer demand: We are going to deliver leading support for running Payara Server and Payara Micro in Kubernetes. We are expanding Docker support with the concept of a Docker Node. This will enable Payara instances to be packaged into a Docker container and managed as standard instances from the Domain Administration Server. The population of instances will be dynamic, enabling the number of instances in the domain to fluctuate as container instances come and go. Finally, we will enhance our Kubernetes support enabling the DAS to monitor Payara Pods and instruct Kubernetes to kill pods that are failing, as well as further integration of Kubernetes configuration and security.

Public Cloud

We aim to make the Payara Platform the best open source platform for production applications on the cloud.

During 2019, we will be building deep integration with public cloud providers APIs enabling Jakarta EE developers to build applications that work well in Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, AWS and others. We aim to deliver support for key enterprise services like Security, Messaging, Integration, Monitoring and Persistence across the main cloud platforms integrated to the Payara Platform.

Eclipse MicroProfile and Jakarta EE

Throughout 2019 we will continue the good work of 2018 and track and release MicroProfile support on both Payara Server and Payara Micro. We will also integrate these APIs deeply with our runtime to give deep support, manageability and monitoring for applications using these APIs. We envisage Jakarta EE 8 being released in 2019 and work will start on Jakarta EE 9. We will certify the Payara Platform as a Jakarta EE 8 compliant implementation when the programme is released, and we will lead a number of Jakarta EE API projects to evolve the Jakarta EE platform in the directions the Payara Platform community and our customers need.

Developer and Administrator Tooling

The team want you to love using the Payara Platform and that means we need to focus on tooling and diagnostics for developers and administrators building solutions on the Payara Platform. The whole reason for existence of application platforms like Payara is to make life easier - so with this in mind, we have a number of things planned for 2019. We will continue to release plugins for IDEs and ensure their quality and ease is top priority. We aim to deliver a full monitoring console for the Payara Platform. We have built many diagnostic capabilities into the platform over the past couple of years and now is the time to ensure that is visible to developers and operators. We also plan to deliver deeper diagnostics and intelligence about your applications and how they are performing.

JDK 11 Support

We aim to deliver JDK 11 support in the first half of 2019 for Payara Platform 5. The goal is to run Payara 5 on JDK 11 early in the year with full support for customers in the 192 release timeframe. Payara Platform 5 is currently supported on JDK 8 and customers get full support for Zulu Enterprise JDK 8 through to 2024 due to our partnership with Azul.

Performance and Scalability

Finally, as always, we are focused on performance and scalability. We strive to drive down resource usage and increase performance and scalability. The Payara Platform is open source but it is also designed for high performance; high scale production workloads and this is always a focus.

2019 Payara Platform Release Schedule

As usual we will have four releases of the Payara Platform 5 in the community stream for 2019:

5.191 in Q1

5.192 in Q2

5.193 in Q3

5.194 in Q4

For commercial support customers with a Migration & Project Support contract or Payara Enterprise contract, there will be monthly releases in the Feature and Stability Streams. Payara Platform 5.191 will be the root of the new customer-only Stability Stream for the duration of 2019.

Get Involved

Payara is an open source company and we deliver the Payara Platform to both customers and community, 100% funded by customer support subscriptions. To experience the benefits of our commercial support programs, take a look at our support options online or download the Support Brochure.

If you are a Payara Server or Payara Micro user and your organization can't help by becoming a support customer, please help by providing bug reports on GitHub, coding and raising pull requests, offering ideas for enhancement requests, by helping out the community on the forums or by updating documentation.