News

Payara Now Part of the Eclipse Foundation's MicroProfile Working Group

• By John K. Waters
• February 8, 2023

Payara, the company behind the popular fork of the open-source GlassFish application server, has joined the Eclipse Foundation's MicroProfile Working Group, the company announced last week.

The MicroProfile specification comprises a collection of enterprise Java APIs and technologies that together form a core baseline for microservices. The Working Group was formed in 2016 "to continue driving the evolution and broad adoption of technologies derived from or related to the MicroProfile project," according to the website.

The current version of the spec is MicroProfile 6. It's based on Jakarta EE 10 Core Profile, which also enables MicroProfile APIs to be used with the full set of Jakarta EE 10 specifications.

"As the software industry continues to embrace 'smaller' deployments, the innovation in the MicroProfile Working Group is step-by-step dismantling the myth that Jakarta EE is only for heavy architectures," said Payra's CEO and founder, Steve Millidge, in a statement. "Our support for MicroProfile furthers our goal of creating enterprise Java that works for everyone, however you chose to design your applications – monolith, microservices or hybrid."

Payara is also a member of the Jakarta EE working group, which bring together a global community of technology organizations and individuals that collaborate "to ensure Jakarta EE remains relevant and continues to evolve as a true, open platform for innovation."

"MicroProfile and Jakarta EE are designed to complement each other," Millidge added. "Being a part of both Working Groups allows us to fully support, develop and champion cloud native enterprise Java under the Eclipse Foundation.

MicroProfile is an open source, vendor neutral, collaborative, initiative that creates technical specifications, APIs, and technology compatibility kits (TCKs) for Java runtimes that enables the development, deployment, and management of cloud-native microservices. The MicroProfile community is responsible for collaborating on and releasing open-source specifications and promoting MicroProfile in the marketplace.

Many innovative microservice enterprise Java environments and frameworks already exist in the Java ecosystem. These projects are creating new features and capabilities to address microservice architectures, leveraging both Jakarta EE/Java EE and non-Jakarta EE technologies.

Among other things, joining the working group furthers Payara's goal of creating enterprise Java that works on all applications, from monolith to microservices or hybrid.

"Our work in the MicroProfile Working Group also allows us to better implement our own MicroProfile certified products," Millidge said. "Payara Platform as a whole is MicroProfile compatible, but this is particularly important for Payara Micro, our lightweight microservices platform of choice."