WildFly 9 Final is released!

As with WildFly 8, WildFly 9 is a certified implemenation of both the Java EE7 full and web profile specifications.

Undertow, the web server in WildFly, has added support for the new HTTP/2 standard. HTTP/2 reduces latency by compressing headers and multiplexing many streams over the same TCP connection. It also supports the ability for a server to push resources to the client before it has requested them, leading to faster page loads. We also included support for SPDY, the predecessor to HTTP/2, in order to support clients that have not yet updated to the new specification. Although, currently, recent versions of Chrome and Firefox provide support for the standard out of the box.

Note that using HTTP/2 requires using Java 8 with a specialized setup procedure. This is because the HTTP/2 standard requires a TLS stack that supports ALPN, and a stock Java install does not include support for it. The extra setup steps will go away once Java 9 is released, which is expected to include ALPN support. Since HTTP/2 is also a goal for Java EE8, it is also expected to be made available in a future Java SE 8 update, likely after Java 9 is released.

WildFly can now be configured to function as an intelligent load balancer, proxying requests to backend WildFly nodes using HTTP, HTTP/2, SPDY, and mod_cluster protocols. This removes the need to use a native web server, such as Apache for this use case. To see this feature in action, check out this interview with Stuart Douglas, the lead of the Undertow project. He demonstrates how domain management, clustering, and the new load balancing capability can be used to deploy and manage a full HA setup from a single point, the WildFly CLI.

Previously, in order to achieve graceful draining of sessions/requests, a load balancer was required. The new server suspend mode in WildFly, once activated rejects new requests but allows old ones to complete. Once the suspension process has completed the server can either be stopped without aborting in-flight transactions, left in suspended state while maintenance is performed, or returned back to running state where new requests are once again allowed.

You can now manage the server using CLI commands, without having a running server. This works similar to the admin-only mode, but does not require launching the server, and using a TCP port. Instead the CLI embeds the server and launches it directly in admin-only mode.

For more information, check out the detailed article on this feature, written by Brian Stansberry, the lead of WildFly’s domain management capabilities.

The new "WildFly Servlet" distribution, provides a stripped down, yet fully manageable Servlet-only distribution. This is useful for applications that prefer to roll-their-own frameworks, and wish to conserve disk space.

The base architecture of WildFly has been fully separated, and is now versioned separately from the full platform. We now have two different source repositories as a result.

The logging subsystem now supports direct downloads of log files. The log-file mangagement resource lists all log files defined in the jboss.server.log.dir that are defined in the subsystem.

Curl Example:

HTTP Get Example:

The Web Services subsystem is now based on JBossWS 5.0.0.Final. This is a major leap forward, bringing new features and performance improvements in WildFly. Notable new featues include:

We have switched our IIOP implementation from JacORB to a downstream branch of the OpenJDK Orb. This change should lead to better interoperability with the JVM ORB and the Java EE RI.

All clustering services, including all Infinispan caches, will now share a single JGroups channel by default. The channels supplied by the JGroups subsystem are now fully managed resources and can multiplex messages to any number of "forks" via the FORK protocol. This requires fewer resources than the multi-channel, shared transport configuration of previous releases.

The IronJacamar container has been upgraded to version 1.2.4.Final, fixing bugs and adding some new features.

Highlights include:

The managment console includes a new improved UI layout, as well as many additional capabilities including: