WildFly 8 Final is released!

The biggest development in this release is that WildFly 8 is now officially Java EE7 certified, meeting both the Web and the Full profiles.

For those unfamiliar with Java EE7, it is an industry leading specification that offers applications productivity improving capabilities, including support for the modern web, batch processing, and improvements in dependency injection.

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. This release adds numerous improvements including greater extensibility and enhanced security capabilities.

By utilizing HTTP upgrade, WildFly 8 has moved nearly all of its protocols to be multiplexed over two HTTP ports: a management port, and an application port. This is a big benefit to cloud providers (such as OpenShift) who run hundreds to thousands of instances on a single server.

In total, our default configuration now only has two ports:

Note that since CR1 we have finally dropped the native management port 9999, which instead uses the HTTP management port (9990). Our full profile configuration also dropped the native JMS ports 5445 and 5455, which instead are multiplexed over port 8080. However, all of these original ports can still be enabled if desired.

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. As part of this work, LDAP integration was improved to support group mapping to roles, as well as configurable caching strategies. Finally, a new restricted audit log can be enabled including the ability to offload to a secure syslog server.

WildFly now provides a specialized Java security manager that allows you to define per-deployment security permissions, and also greatly improves upon the performance of using the standard Java security manager. In addition to the standard Java EE permissions.xml, a more flexible jboss-permissions.xml descriptor is also supported.

The management API now supports the ability to list and view the available log files on a server.

There is also a new ablity to define a custom formatters other than the default pattern formmatter.

For deployments that wish to bypass container logging, there is now an attribute, add-logging-api-dependencies, to disable the adding of the implicit server logging dependencies. Another option is to use a jboss-deployment-structure.xml to exclude the logging subsystem which will stop the logging subsystem from processing a deployment.

Finally, use-deployment-logging-config, has been added to enable or disable processing pf logging configuration files found in a deployment.

Note that the system property org.jboss.as.logging.per-deployment to disable per-deployment logging has been deprecated.

WildFly 8 now supports a DistributedWorkManager implementation based on the JGroups project, and the JCA connection manager has been enhanced with the lazy connection manager extensions.

The data sources and resource adapters subsystems allow setting capacity policies and additional flush strategies as well. Resource adapters now allows a security inflow policy per deployment.

More information is available here.

Clustering support was heavily refactored in WildFly 8 and includes the following:

Within the CLI configuration it is now possible to define aliases to servers that you regularly connect to allowing you to specify the name of an alias when using the 'connect' command instead of requiring the full URL.

The CLI GUI now lets you "Explore" any node in the tree. This makes it much easier to work on a single section of the tree and is particularly useful in domain mode when the tree gets huge. https://community.jboss.org/wiki/AGUIForTheCommandLineInterface#explore

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.

A new download option is now available in WildFly 8, called the "core" distribution. This distribution is ideal for framework authors that want to build their own application runtime using the powerful WildFly 8 architecture.

This architecture includes:

This release has improved compatibility with JDK8, and we now encourage everyone interested in Java 8 to run WildFly 8 on it as well. Expect future releases of WildFly to include APIs that take advantage of the new language features.

A number of major web services improvements also occured in this release:

WildFly 8 includes RESTEasy 3 which supports the standard Java EE REST APIs (JAX-RS 2.0) and also provides a number of useful extensions including JSON Web Encryption, Jackson, Yaml, JSON-P, and Jettison.

Hibernate Search is now offered out of the box in WildFly. Hibernate Search indexes objects for fast full-text searching. Multiple data sources are supported including Infinispan and standard database entities.

Java EE7 no longer requires the following technologies:

We decided to completely remove support for these technologies due to the high maintenance cost, low community interest, and much better alternative solutions. If you are not able to port at this time, we recommend looking at JBoss EAP6, which provides long term maintenance and support of these technologies,