Onward to WildFly 17 and Beyond!

A major focus will be on making WildFly as easy and productive as possible to use on the cloud, particularly on Kubernetes and OpenShift. In particular we’ll be working on the following:

Of course, the EE standards are very important to WildFly. We’re very focused on Jakarta EE, with a number of members of the WildFly community involved in the various specs. We’re keeping a close eye on the finalization of Jakarta EE 8 with certification a high priority. As work on Jakarta EE 9 ramps up we’ll be active participants, although I don’t expect significant change in WildFly related to EE 9 until the fall at earliest.

Darran Lofthouse and Farah Juma do an excellent job of maintaining a roadmap for security-related work in WildFly. I encourage you to read Darran’s recent blog post to learn more about what’s coming in WildFly 17.

Besides the broader topics I’ve touched on above, there are always individual items that are in progress. Here are a few noteworthy ones:

I regularly hear from community members asking about MicroProfile. Last year we added subsystems to bring support of MicroProfile Config, Health, Metrics and OpenTracing. The overall focus there was on "observability" of WildFly, particular in the cloud. These subsystems were oriented toward allowing monitoring and management tooling to observe the behavior of WildFly servers. The MicroProfile specs were a good choice because observers want to work in a standardized way.

As this year continues we’ll think about adding support for some other MicroProfile specifications, perhaps as new subsystems within the main WildFly codebase, or perhaps via new projects in the WildFly Extras organization along with a Galleon feature pack and a Galleon layer to allow easy integration into a WildFly installation.

I suspect anything on this would be in WildFly 18 or later.

I’d love to have input both into our roadmap and into the requirements for the implementations of features. If you’re interested in following WildFly feature development one thing to do is to monitor the WFLY and WFCORE projects in JIRA. Beyond that I encourage you to subscribe to the wildfly-dev mailing list. It’s relatively low traffic, and I’ve been encouraging folks to post a brief note to the list when work on a new feature kicks off. So that’s a good way to hear early on about work to which you may have something to add.

When we went to the quarterly time-boxed release model, we formalized our feature development process quite a bit. In order to reliably release on time, we needed to be sure that features were truly ready for release before they ever got merged. No more merging things that were 90% done with the expectation of further improvements before the final release. To help facilitate this we started requiring the creation of an asciidoc analysis document at the start of feature work. This document is meant to cover:

The analysis documents are all submitted as github pull requests to a github repo we created for them. Discussion of the document is done via comments on and updates to the PR. The document remains unmerged until the feature code itself is merged. The analysis is meant to be a living document, revised as necessary as new things are learned as the feature is developed.

One of the goals we had with all this is encourage community input to the feature requirements. So I very much encourage you to have a look at and comment on the PRs for any features in which you’re interested. The announcement posts to wildfly-dev that I mentioned are meant to inform you when new PRs are submitted.

Following are the expected key dates associated with the WildFly 17 release:

Finally, thanks, as always, for your interest in and support of WildFly!