Payara Server

Payara Server is an open-source application server derived from GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. It was created in 2014^[1] by C2B2 Consulting as a drop in replacement for GlassFish after Oracle announced it was discontinuing commercial support for GlassFish. By comparison to GlassFish, Payara Server is released more frequently on a quarterly basis with added bug fixes, patches and enhancements. Since April 2016 Payara Server is sponsored by Payara Services Ltd who are responsible for ongoing development and coordinating community contributions.

Overview

Payara Server has been developed in 2014 as a fork and drop in replacement for GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. It was released in October 2014 in response to Oracle’s announcement to end commercial support for GlassFish.^[2] Commercial support for Payara Server users is currently provided by Payara Services Ltd.

Payara Server is derived from the upstream GlassFish source tree with Payara’s own enhancements and fixes. Development of Payara Server is independent from Oracle’s development of GlassFish, and Payara Server releases are always based on the most recent version of GlassFish.

Payara Server is dual licensed under both the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) Version 1.1 or CDDL and GPL v2 + the Classpath exception.

Community

The Payara Server project is hosted on GitHub,^[3] allowing the community access to view and edit the source code. Payara encourages the community to contribute through raising bugs, suggesting new features and enhancements on GitHub.

Payara uses the Fork and Pull model. This means that if community members want to make any changes, they need to fork the Payara project and make their changes in their own repository. They will then need to create a pull request back into the Payara project's master branch to merge the changes into the main project.

Payara Services Ltd commercial support subscriptions also fund development and engineering effort of the Payara Server open source project.

Releases

• Payara Server 4.1.144 – 31 October 2014 – first release based on GlassFish 4 with added bug fixes and patches.
• Payara Server 4.1.151 – 30 January 2015 – integrating Hazelcast 3.4 and JSR107, upgraded JBatch module, added multi language distribution and some bug fixes.
• Payara Server 4.1.152 – 1 May 2015 – featuring the first release of Payara Micro and Payara Domain Template.
• Payara Server 4.1.153 – 31 July 2015 – featuring improvements for the Payara Micro API, a new auto-binding feature for the HTTP and HTTPS ports of Payara Micro instances; an update to the JCache (JSR107) API; updated Start-Domain Command; and Payara Blue, the Payara Server release for the IBM JDK, allowing AIX users to run Payara Server.
• Payara Server 4.1.1.154 – 23 October 2015 – first Payara Server release based on GlassFish 4.1. featuring 11 Updated Modules, 11 Enhancements and 25 Bug Fixes.
• Payara Server 4.1.1.161 – 29 January 2016 – featuring Slow SQL Logging and in-built Server Healthchecks.
• Payara Server 4.1.1.162 – 6 May 2016 – Updated clustering with Hazelcast, updated Docker images, new Payara Micro features, Asadmin Recorder, connection pool checker; 8 new features, 20 enhancements and 37 bug fixes.
• Payara Server 4.1.1.163 - 16 August 2016 - added tech preview for Request Tracing, Notification Service, Hazelcast EJB Persistent Timer Store for Payara Micro, JMX Monitoring Agent; featuring 44 bug fixes, 34 enhancements, 6 new features and 6 component upgrades.
• Payara Server 4.1.1.164 - 14 November 2016 - added 34 bug fixes, 15 enhancements,10 new features, 8 component upgrades and a new version of Payara MicroProfile. The release featured extended Request Tracing, Enhanced control over implicit CDI scanning and redesigned Admin Console view of Hazelcast cluster members.

All Payara Server release notes can be found in the documentation.^[4]

Payara Micro

Payara Micro is Payara Server’s microservices version and enables users to run war files from the command line without any application server installation. It is small, only 57MB in size and simple to use. Payara Micro also comes with a Java API so it can be embedded and launched from all Java applications.

Support

Payara Server was originally developed in response to Oracle’s announcement^[5] to drop commercial support for GlassFish Open Source Edition. As such Payara offers a drop in replacement for GlassFish and support is available from Payara Services Ltd.

External links

• http://www.payara.fish Payara Services Ltd

References