Payara Roadmap 2021

As the first month of 2021 comes to a close, let’s take a look at the plans for enhancements and changes coming this year and beyond. The Payara Roadmap 2021 webinar covers:

• Benefits of the Jakarta EE model
  • What to expect from Jakarta EE 9 in relation to the Payara Platform
• What to expect from MicroProfile 4.0 in relation to the Payara Platform
• How the Payara Platform is evolving and moving toward Payara 6
• Updates and progress of the Payara Cloud project, our new PaaS product currently starting the closed beta testing phase
• The latest news regarding the next major OpenJDK release – JDK 17 Long Term Support (LTS) and what that means for Payara Platform
• A closer look at what’s to come in the next three months

After Steve’s presentation, live webinar attendees were given the opportunity to ask questions about the roadmap and future plans for the Payara suite of products and services.

Watch the Payara Roadmap 2021 Webinar

Benefits of the Jakarta EE Model

Because the Payara Platform is a Jakarta EE compatible implementation, Steve starts the discussion with a conversation about the benefits of Jakarta EE Model. Jakarta EE came from Java EE, which had a very specific model of developing applications.

Jakarta EE splits your application away from your runtime (such as the Payara Platform). You develop your application using the standard Jakarta EE and MicroProfile APIs, and your application and APIs all run on the compute infrastructure (Bare Metal, Kubernetes, Docker, etc).

Jakarta EE splits the packaging of your application from your runtime (Payara Server). You build your WAR, JAR, or EAR file, concentrate on building your application and packaging it, while Payara Platform manages the other aspects of running your application, such as:

• Security (connectors, authentication checks)
• Configuration
• Logging
• Threads (manages workloads)
• Messaging
• Datasources
• Metrics (see how your application is running)
• Network (network protocols, http, websockets, soap, Corba, etc)

The separation between your application and compute infrastructure allows Payara to manage the majority of your infrastructure needs so all you need to worry about is using the standards based APIs from Jakarta EE and MicroProfile. We want you to build applications and not worry about all of the effort related to the infrastructure, while Payara Platform makes it possible to run your application on any infrastructure that comes along in the future.

Looking Ahead to Payara Platform in 2021

You should be able to take your WAR file, whether monolith or microservices, and deploy it anywhere: IoT and edge with Payara Micro, scale across containers to Kubernetes with Payara Server, or large scale, hybrid cloud environments with Payara Cloud.

Payara Cloud will be released as a PaaS initially, with the future goal of creating a product you can install and manage it in your own cloud and datacenters. Payara Cloud is starting the closed beta testing phase in February 2021.

To accomplish these goals, Payara development is focused on six pillars:

• Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Standards
• Compute Infrastructure Agnostic (Payara will work well on any infrastructure)
• Deep Diagnostics
• Developer Experience
• Ecosystem Integration
• Stability

Key Changes to Payara Core in Community Edition 

Before the release of Payara 6 in 2022, we are working toward the following improvements and changes in the Payara Platform Community Edition:

• New CDI implementation
• New Servlet implementation
• Better Integrated tracing and monitoring
• Logging improvements
• New EJB timer sub-system
• New gRPC based remoting

Payara Core Timeline

Here’s what’s expected and when (subject to change based on external events occurring in the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile development):

February 2021

• MicroProfile 4.0 Support
• Jakarta EE 9 Compatible Implementation

June 2021 

• MicroProfile 4.1 Support

September 2021 

• Jakarta EE 9.1 
• JDK17 Support (latest LTS)

December 2021

• MicroProfile 5.0

Quarter One 2022

• Payara 6 Release(aligned with Jakarta EE 10 date, which has not been set yet.)
• Jakarta EE 10 Support

Watch the 30 minute webinar and the following Q&A session for all of the details of Payara’s 2021 Roadmap.