News

Jakarta EE 8 Compatible WildFly 18 Released

• By John K. Waters
• October 9, 2019

The latest version of WildFly, the open-source, Java EE 8 and Jakarta EE 8 certified application server originally created by Red Hat's JBoss division, is now available for download. WildFly 18 now runs on JDK 13, adds a range of security upgrades, and is now "better aligned" with the Jakarta EE API projects.

A lot of effort went into further aligning WildFly with the Jakarta community, said Brian Stansberry, the current WildFly project lead, in a blog post. "Specifically, WildFly incorporates a large number of component jars that provide the various EE APIs," he said. "For some EE specs, WildFly directly provided jars produced by the various Java EE spec projects; for others the JBoss.org community has provided its own jars, derived from source from the Java EE spec projects. For both cases, for WildFly 18 we moved to align the source for our API jars with the source coming from the active Jakarta community."

Stansberry emphasized that the Jakarta EE 8 APIs are API identical to the Java EE 8 APIs, and that, generally speaking, the method implementations are identical as well. "So, this change of the source from which we get the API jars is not expected to introduce any runtime incompatibility," he said. "This change is all about aligning the code we provide with projects that are actively maintained."

Stansberry is probably best known for his work on the development of the administration and management capabilities in WildFly and JBoss EAP 6. Red Hat re-christened the JBoss Application Server project "WildFly" back in 2013. The name was selected by members of the JBoss.org open source community in a special election in late 2012.

WildFly 18 also "runs well" on the recently released JDK 13, Stansberry said, by which he meant that the main WildFly test suite runs with no more than a few failures in areas not expected to be commonly used. "We want developers who are trying to evaluate what the latest JVM means for their applications to be able to look to WildFly as a useful development platform," he said.

He added: While we do want to run well on the most recent JDK, our recommendation is that you run WildFly on the most recent long-term support release [LTS], i.e. on JDK 11 for WildFly 18. We do considerably more testing of WildFly itself on the LTS JDKs, and we make no attempt to ensure the projects producing the various libraries we integrate are testing their libraries on anything other than JDK 8 or 11."

The list of security enhancements in this release, 18 in all, includes SSL certificate revocation using OCSP and support for audit logging with RFC5424/RFC3164.