WildFly 8 Beta is released!

Undertow, the new cutting-edge web server in WildFly 8 is designed for maximum throughput and scalability, including environments with over a million connections. It supports non-blocking and blocking handlers, traditional and asynchronous servlets, and JSR-356 web socket handlers. It is highly customizable, with the ability for applications to implement nearly anything from dynamic request routing to custom protocols. It can also function as a very efficient, pure non-blocking reverse proxy, allowing WildFly to delegate to other web servers with minimal impact to running applications. Undertow has been fully integrated for several releases now. This release finalizes the key features of this integration with reverse proxy support.

An important goal of WildFly 8 was to greatly reduce the number of ports used by multiplexing protocols over HTTP using HTTP Upgrade. This is a big benefit to cloud providers (such as OpenShift) who run hundreds to thousands of instances on a single server. Our default configuration now only has three ports, and will become two ports by final. We decided to preserve the original native management port for this Beta release to give those using legacy clients time to update before the final release. The native management port, 9999, is deprecated and will be removed by final.

WildFly can now support organizations with separated management responsibilities and restrictions. Roles represent different sets of permissions such as runtime operation execution, configuration areas that can read or written, and the ability to audit changes and manage users. In addition a new restricted audit log can be enabled including the ability to offload to a secure syslog server.

The infrastructure to support the application of patches to an existing install has been implemented. This capability allows for a remote client to install and rollback new static modules and binary files using the WildFly management protocol.