Wildfly 8.0.0.Final is Released

On Tuesday JBoss announced the release of WildFly 8.0.0.Final with full certification for the Java EE7 Web and Full profiles which makes JBoss the first of the "big" vendors to distribute a certified EE7 release.  This certainly represents a faster turn around than their corresponding EE6 delivery cycle which also incorporated a complete overhaul of the traditional JBoss Application server architecture.

Lets take a quick look at some of the features.

Listening Ports

JBoss 4.3 Port Listing

For those old and grey enough to remember earlier JBoss releases each service provided by the container would typically command its own listening port.  For those of you who are not old enough or chose not to remember I have captured the full port listing from JBoss 4.3 for posterity.  Either way you'll be pleased to here that Wildfly 8 takes advantage of the HTML upgrade feature, in the same way that Web Sockets work, to multiplex all application traffic over a single port; 8080 by default.

For management console access and CLI scripting WildFly retains the domain administration port, 9990 by default.  This ensures that admin traffic remains separate from the application and can therefore be controlled appropriately with firewall rules.

Web Server - Undertow

Previous incarnations of the JBoss / WildFly Web Container relied on an implementation based on Apache Tomcat's DNA.  This latest release see the Web implementation entirely replaced with Undertow a high performance web server with support for JSR-356 Web Sockets, blocking and non-blocking handlers.  Public independent benchmarks are favourable and some can be found here with claimed support for over a million connections.

Role Based Access Control and Audit

The concept of centralised domain management was introduced into JBoss Application Server back in the AS 7 releases, before the "WildFly" name was born.  However up until now there has been no capability to assign role based privileges to domain user accounts accessing the administration console or CLI tooling therefore anyone accessing these tools could effectively do anything they wanted.  This latest release introduces Role Based Access Control and integration with LDAP to manage users domain privileges.

Removed Services

Taking advantage of services whose support is no longer mandatory for EE7 certification, WildFly has removed JAX-RPC, CMP / EJB 2.1 Entities and JSR-88, the J2EE Application Deployment API.  No doubt this helped with the speed EE7 certification was reached but will also prevent potential users who are still running legacy Web Services and / or EJB Entity Beans from migrating directly to this release.

Ok, so that's just a short summary of the things you'll find or not find in WildFly 8.  For a full listing of all the changes take a look at the release notes here.