The WildFly community announced the latest release of WildFly 34, emphasizing significant changes made to WildFly Preview, a variant that allows users to try out new features before they become part of the stable release. It now includes support for Jakarta Data 1.0, MicroProfile REST Client 4.0, and MicroProfile Telemetry 2.0. Other minor updates include ORM 6.6.x, Hibernate search 7.2, and FasterXML Jackson 2.17.
A notable change to this release is the restructuring of the BOMs. These changes are an internal update and a restructuring effort of the Server BOMs to closely align with the distribution of release artifacts. The effort started earlier this year and is now complete. For example, a list of EE Preview and Expansion BOMs is now part of the latest release. However, EJB Client, JAXWS Client, JMS Client, EE, and EE with tools are all unchanged.
Lastly, default values are another interesting development that enables constraints affecting the HTTP management interface. When the application server runs at the `Community` stability level or lower, four attributes are available to control the resource constraints.
The required system properties with default values are listed below, and system administrators can also configure them at startup time.
❶ backlog = 50
❷ connection-high-water = 100
❸ connection-low-water = 75
❹ no-request-timeout = 60000
❶ org.wildfly.management.backlog: The number of connection requests allowed before the socket accepts requests by the server process.
❷ org.wildfly.management.connection-high-water: The maximum number of connections before pausing.
❸ org.wildfly.management.connection-low-water: After the high-water connection, the server does not accept more requests until the low-water constraint is satisfied.
❹ org.wildfly.management.no-request-timeout: Time value in milliseconds until the server starts to close the connection due to lack of requests.
WildFly 34 is a compatible implementation of the Jakarta EE 10 Platform, Web Profile, and Core Profile, as were its predecessors for previous versions of Jakarta EE. Users are supported when running WildFly with JDK version 11, 17, or 21. The WildFly team also cautioned users to move off JDK 11, as version WildFly 34 is the last release supporting it. WildFly Preview no longer supports JDK 11. It's also possible to run the latest release with JDK 23. However, the team noted that there might be some corner cases where the current test suite fails.
WildFly Preview supports Jakarta EE 11. The stable release of WildFly 36 (currently not on the release schedule, but perhaps in Spring 2025) will aim to fully support Jakarta EE 11. More details may be found in this blog post and the WildFly 34 release notes.