It’s the season of joy, cheer, giving, and fish (no, I haven’t just added the last one) and so as a gift to the world we’ve just released the first Beta release of Payara Server 5 in time for the holidays - download here. I know, it’s exactly what you wanted.

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School’s Out! Welcome to the Grid

For this Beta release, we’ve pulled out Shoal and GMS – replacing the clustering functionality they provided with a Domain-wide Datagrid via Hazelcast. In simple terms, you can think of it as replacing multiple smaller clusters with one giant one. To keep things simple and not require you to faff around with multicast unless you really need or want to, we’ve also implemented a “Domain Discovery” method of clustering as a default (in Payara Server anyway, multicast is still the default for Payara Micro at the moment); instances using this clustering method will automatically connect to the DAS and join the domain-wide cluster.

We haven’t completely gutted clusters though, they’re still present in Payara Server but are now more akin to a target group than a traditional cluster – you create, configure, start, stop, target, and use them in the same way, they’re just no longer in their own little cluster.

I’m sure we’ll have a blog or similar article explaining the changes in greater detail in the future, but for now I hope that you’ll trust us in believing that this is a good thing!

Tolerance is a Virtue

This beta release marks our first public release of a build containing MicroProfile Fault Tolerance 1.0. For those who aren’t aware and didn’t get it from the name, this spec introduces some annotations that you can use to more easily implement actions that should be taken if a method fails.

We’re catching up with MicroProfile 1.2 (just in time for 1.3 to be released! Gah!), so expect to see more MicroProfile specs being implemented SoonTM.

Ssh! Be Very, Very Quiet!

Rounding out this Beta release is support for Kubernetes Secret Volumes. These can be used as a config source; every file in the directory will be treated as a property, with its value as the contents of the respective file.

Wrapping Up

This Beta release brings with it other enhancements and fixes, such as HTTP2, Single Sign On via Hazelcast, faster JSF initialisation, a couple of usability improvements to Payara Micro, as well as preparing Payara Micro for a future Arquillian container (connector). We’ll cover it all in the release notes, don’t worry!

We’re also aware that not everything is working quite right on Windows at the moment – thank you for your feedback, we’ll get it all fixed for the final release.

As we’ve mentioned before, this latest release is still a pre-release, and so we wouldn’t recommend that you use it in production. We would however like you to try it out and give us some feedback!

Download Payara Server 5 Beta 1

Happy Holidays!