The JBoss team at Red Hat is hoping you’re ready for a new Java platform. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform version 7 entered beta yesterday, making it available to users for free. This new version includes Java-focused updates while adding the WildFly Application Server 10 to the bundle for the first time.
WildFly has been in production since 2014, but from another angle, it’s existed since 1999. That’s because in 2014 the JBoss Application Server was renamed to WildFly and split out as its own project inside the JBoss stack.
Today, WildFly has yielded the fruit of many years of optimizations and reworking for the JBoss platform. WildFly 10 includes improvements over other JVMs. For a start, WildFly has aggressive memory management. WildFly 10 was built to minimize heap allocation in the base runtime. It manages to do this by using commonly cached and indexed metadata over duplicate full parses, which reduces heap object churn.
(Related: Red Hat brings data integration to JBoss)
Configuration and management is easier too, as the WildFly administration console is now completely stateless, purely client-driven, and requires no memory on the server.
JBoss EAP 7 is designed for use in the cloud, and thus WildFly offers a 10x speedup in start times. This focus on cloud hosting also resulted in better clustering and high-availability support. The runtime offers two modes: traditional single JVM mode, and a multi-JVM mode that synchronizes configuration across any number of processes and hosts.
This release of JBoss also supports Java EE 7 and Java SE 8. And despite the fact that Project Jigsaw (an effort to modularize Java) is scheduled for Java SE 9, JBoss EAP 7 and WildFly 10 use sane classloading using JBoss Modules to provide application isolation.
Modularization does not end there, either. WildFly supports Arquillian, a component model for integration tests that execute inside the real runtime environment.
