We're excited to announce that the second Alpha release of Payara Server 5 is now available for download! We highly encourage you to give it a go, test it out and let us know what further improvements are needed.

This release focuses on initial JDK 9 support and internal component updates.

Payara Server 5 Alpha 2 has basic support for JDK 9 when using the domain “payaradomain”. With this domain Payara Server starts and applications can be deployed. It runs almost all samples from the Java EE 7 samples test suite, except for some of the EJB samples which result in a CORBA related failure. This will be fixed in a next release.

Furthermore, the JSON library Jettison has been replaced by the more modern and better maintained Jackson library.

A long-standing issue with building the Payara project was that on several operating systems or even different versions of the same OS, the build would fail for no apparent reason. This appeared to be caused by an ordering issue and lingering state in the embedded tests. This has been fixed for Payara 5 Alpha 2.

Please note that Payara Server 5 is an *alpha* release and as such it is not recommend for use in production! We really appreciate your feedback so please report any issues and bugs for this Alpha release on GitHub.

Moving forwards toward Beta 1 and beyond, we would like to modernise Payara Server further by removing more (internal) legacy components and replacing Mojarra 2.3 with the Mojarra 2.4 master (same features as 2.3 but with refactoring, a more modern build and a faster startup), integrating Java EE security into the admin console, providing a new “legacy free” profile, and more.

Payara Server 5 Alpha 2 has Payara Server 4.1.2.173 as baseline, with additionally a number of changes that will also be included in Payara Server 4.1.2.174.

A list of all changes that went into Payara Server 5 Alpha 2 can be found on GitHub.

Enjoy the testing!