Red Hat has released WildFly 27, featuring support for JDK 11, JDK 17, Jakarta EE 10 and MicroProfile 5.0. There are also dependency upgrades to Hibernate ORM 6.1, Hibernate Search 6.1, Infinispan 14, JGroups 5.2, RESTEasy 6.2, and Weld 5. WildFly 27 is a compatible implementation for Jakarta EE 10, having passed the TCKs in the Platform, Web and Core profiles. Jakarta EE 8 and Jakarta EE 9.1 will no longer be supported.
This release includes all the major specifications, e.g., Jakarta Authentication 3.0, Jakarta Concurrency 3.0, Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection 4.0, Jakarta Enterprise Beans 4.0, Jakarta JSON Binding 3.0, Jakarta RESTful Web Services 3.1, Jakarta JSON Processing 2.1, Jakarta Authorization 2.1, Jakarta Bean Validation 3.0, and many other important specifications. However, the primary focus of this release remains on compatibility with Jakarta EE 10.
Not only does this release include Jakarta EE 10, but it also has new features like observability, cloud, EJB, security, provisioning, etc. One of WildFly's observability features is Micrometer, a vendor-neutral application monitoring tool that is only available as a preview.
This release delivers significant changes to the WildFly images for OpenShift. With these changes, the S2I (source-to-image) build takes less time than an old WildFly image, as no more provisioning is performed when building the application. The size of the builder image is also smaller than it was with the old WildFly S2I builder image. Besides, the cloud-server and postgresql-server WildFly S2I builders define Maven projects and Helm charts for WildFly YAML files that can be reused. With all of these, developers will now be able to use these builders to create application images much faster.
With this release, developers can also use an Infinispan cache as an EJB timer store, and the distributed EJB subsystem is also supported. Most notably, it adds support for marshalling Java record classes.
The experimental feature of Hibernate Search, which allows entities from different instances of the same application to be indexed at the same time, now works with WildFly Preview. In addition, several modules only meant for internal use have now been made public so that applications can use the APIs directly.
The WildFly project started making two versions of its application server with the release of WildFly 22. The standard version of "WildFly" is the server that developers have been using for many years. WildFly Preview is a technical preview variant of the server. Its goal is to show the community what features will be included in upcoming releases.
It is important to note that Java SE 8 is no longer supported, beginning with the WildFly 27 series. While an LTS JDK release is recommended, WildFly runs well on JDK 19. The release document stated that Java 11 would be supported at least until WildFly 28 and likely after that.
Even though this release added great support for some important features, it also made some changes that aren't compatible with older versions, like RESTEasy Spring and Weld Probe. RESTEasy Spring support has been removed from standard WildFly. Support for integrating the Spring libraries has yet to produce final releases. Work may be done in the future to reintroduce RESTEasy Spring. Nonetheless, the Weld Probe development mode is no longer supported by WildFly 27.
Reza Rahman, principal program manager at Microsoft and Jakarta EE ambassador, expressed his feelings about this release, tweeting:
Very happy to see that WildFly 27 fully supports Jakarta EE 10! It joins the ranks of GlassFish 7 and Payara 6. Open Liberty is not too far behind, either. Developers have many good choices to give Jakarta EE 10 a spin.
Developers can now download WildFly 27 for testing. The release comes with a Galleon feature pack for WildFly Preview for developers who use bootable jars or Galleon CLI. The ZIP or tar.gz file is available at the Wildfly downloads site, right next to the main WildFly release files for the same version.
Developers who wish to learn more can leverage the news items What's New for WildFly 27 in the Cloud, and WildFly Bootable JAR 8.1 is Released! posted by Jean-François Denise, senior software engineer at Red Hat.