General Info
This page provides some general information about the Payara Project.
Payara has a release every quarter. Each release incorporates fixes and enhancements from the Payara team, GlassFish upstream, and the community.
The payara naming strategy works off of the pre-existing GlassFish Strategy. The Payara naming strategy is to append the year and quarter as the final dot version of the release. For example, for the Payara release built on GlassFish 4.1, released in quarter 3 of 2015, the version number would be payara-4.1.153.
In the case of updates, we will simply attach an additional point number to the end of the version number described above. For example, if a patch is released for Payara 4.1.152, the version number would be 4.1.152.1. This will be in addition to any extra point releases that Oracle do for GlassFish, so it's possible for a version number to be something like 4.1.1.152.1!
Releases will also have a name attached to the release. For example, the name attached to Payara 4.1.152 is #badassfish.
From Payara 4.1.152 onwards, we will be implementing a strategy concerning pulling in changes from the GlassFish upstream, and to making changes late into a release's development time.
Two to three weeks before a release, we will implement a change freeze. This means that no new features or changes will go into the coming release of Payara. The remaining two to three weeks will be used for finding any bugs brought on by changes and fixes implemented for the coming release. If any bugs are found, these will be corrected before the release; if we can't fix it before the release date, we will simply revert the change that caused the bug (pending a review).
We aim to do three cherry picks from the GlassFish upstream for each release: just after a release; at the beginning of the penultimate month of the release; and again at the beginning of the final month of the release (before the change freeze). This to allow us time to find and fix any errors that may be brought in from the GlassFish upstream.
If a bug fix is committed to the GlassFish upstream during our change freeze, we will consider pulling in that solitary commit before the release.
The Payara project is hosted on GitHub, allowing us to make use of the various tools GitHub has integrated for managing projects. GitHub also makes allowing the community access to view and edit the source code very easy and public.
We make use of the Fork and Pull model (see here: https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/). This means that if you want to make any changes, you'll need to fork the Payara project and make your changes in your own repository. You will then need to create a pull request back into the Payara project's master branch to merge your changes into the main project.
Before we merge your pull request though, you must read and sign the Individual Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before sending it to us at the address specified on the document, or as an email attachment to info@payara.co.
Once we've received the CLA and checked it for any mistakes, we'll allow any pull requests you've made to start being merged.
In most cases, pull requests will not be merged immediately. This is to allow the Payara team, and other members of the community, to review and dliberate over any of the changes made; we will typically wait 2-3 days before merging any pull requests.
We make use of GitHub's integrated issue tracker to allow the community to create enhancement and bug fix requests. The only requirements to create a bug fix or enhancement request is a GitHub account, and a reproducible bug or idea for an enhancement; you do not need to sign the CLA to create an enhancement or bug fix request.
Someone on the Payara team, or someone from the community, will then investigate and converse with you about the enhancement request or bug.
We also attach labels and milestones to issues to help both us, and the community, search through and track issues.
We make use of GitHub's in-built wiki to store and host our technical documentation about Payara, as well as general information (such as this document) about the Payara project.
For technical documentation, we only store documentation that we have written, which typically pertains to new or modified features and commands made by us or the community; we do not host GlassFish documentation, nor will we rewrite it for unmodified modules.