WildFly 8 CR1 is released!

The biggest development in this release is that WildFly 8 is now passing both the full and web profiles of the Java EE7 TCK. We are now submitting the paperwork for official certification, and will be able to announce WildFly 8 Final as Java EE certified.

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. As of this release, HornetQ, our JMS implementation, is now multiplexed over HTTP, which fully completes our port reduction goals for WildFly 8.

In total, our default configuration now only has three ports, and will become two ports by final. We decided to preserve the original, now duplicative, native management port once again in this release in order to remove any potential obstacle in evaluating the release.

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.

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.