Payara Server


Payara Server is an open-source application server derived from GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. It was created in 2014 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. Officially compatible with Jakarta EE and MicroProfile.

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. Commercial support and enterprise services 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 Version 1.1 or CDDL and GPL v2 + the Classpath exception.

Community

The Payara Server project is hosted on GitHub, 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 enterprise versions, consultancy services, migration and support subscriptions also fund development and engineering effort of the Payara Server open source project.

Releases

All Payara Server release notes can be found in the documentation.

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. 70MB in size. Payara Micro also comes with a Java API so it can be embedded and launched from all Java applications.
Since 173 release Payara Micro is compatible with Eclipse MicroProfile.

Support

Payara Server was originally developed in response to Oracle’s announcement 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.