Introducing: Payara Platform New & Improved Documentation

Payara Platform is an open source project. We actively encourage users across the world to use, and contribute to, our Jakarta EE application server. We already have a community of 85,000 global users, and growing.

To serve those already using our products, and to encourage more people toget involved, our documentation needs to be best in class. We’ve listened to feedback and made significant improvements, unveiling new and improved documentation content and structure. 

Find out more in this blog.

Where to Find our Documentation 

You can still find our documentation in the same places – onour websiteprimarily, to read and use, and onour GitHubto contribute to.

Now More User-Friendly 

We have simplified and consolidated our documentation: 

Before                                         Now

As you can see, we have massively simplified our documentation to make it more user-friendly. We now have:

• Broader subcategories split into different topics 
• More thorough explanations – starting simple, and explaining step-by-step
• Improved page titles and naming conventions for usability
• Consistent structure and content that should be easier to find and navigate to
  

Easier to Make Contributions  

Enterprise and Community editions are now generated from a single GitHub Repository rather than two separate ones. As contributors write documentation for their changes, this avoids them having to repeat it or forgetting to add it in both repositories. Contributors can now write one page which is applicable for both Community and Enterprise distributions, whereas previously this would require two Pull Requests. There is now a single source of truth. 

Also, contributors would previously have had to generate the side bar navigation – the ‘nav.adoc’  required byAntora– themselves for each change. We now have a script, ‘generate-nav.py’, to generate the ‘nav.adoc’ automatically, so contributors don’t have to go through the time consuming and potentially error prone process of manually editing the file to put it in the correct position. 

Get Involved! 

All these changes are designed to get more people both using and contributing to the Payara Platform. We’d love for your feedback on the documentation changes on thePayara Forum – and if you’ve not considered contributing to Payara before, now would be a great time to start. Contributing to an open source project is a fantastic CV booster andwe send Payara swag to all first-time contributors (when you have signed our Contributor License Agreement).

Hoping you enjoy the new look of Payara’s official documentation!

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