WildFly 28 is released!

By Brian Stansberry | April 20, 2023

I’m pleased to announce that the new WildFly and WildFly Preview 28.0.0.Final releases are available for download at https://wildfly.org/downloads.

New and Notable

Observability

The biggest changes in WildFly 28 relate to the observability space.

The micrometer subsystem has been added to standard WildFly, bringing Micrometer support. As part of this work, we’ve added support for Micrometer integration with our MicroProfile Fault Tolerance implementation. The micrometer subsystem was first introduced in WildFly Preview in WildFly 27. Note that the subsystem has been updated from what was in WildFly Preview 27 to switch to pushing metric data via OTLP to a remote collector, instead of supporting polling of data on the WildFly server’s management interface. (Server and JVM metrics can still be pulled from the management endpoint if the base metrics subsystem is configured.)
We’ve also added support for MicroProfile Telemetry via a new microprofile-telemetry subsystem.
We’ve removed support for MicroProfile Metrics, except for a stub system limited to 'admin-only' mode that’s been kept to facilitate configuration migration. MicroProfile Metrics users are encouraged to use the new micrometer subsystem.
We’ve removed support for MicroProfile OpenTracing, except for a stub system limited to 'admin-only' mode that’s been kept to facilitate configuration migration. MicroProfile OpenTracing users are encouraged to use the new microprofile-telemetry subsystem, or the opentelemetry subsystem upon which it is based.

MicroProfile

Besides the changes in the observability space noted above, there are a couple of important changes in WildFly 28’s MicroProfile support:

We’ve added support for MicroProfile LRA via new microprofile-lra-coordinator and microprofile-lra-participant subsystems.
Except for MicroProfile Metrics and OpenTracing, which have been removed, we’ve updated our support for the other MicroProfile Platform specifications to the MicroProfile Platform 6 versions.

Because we no longer support MicroProfile Metrics, WildFly 28 cannot claim to be a compatible implementation of the MicroProfile 6.0 specification. However, WildFly’s MicroProfile support includes implementations of the following specifications in our "full" (e.g. standalone-full.xml) and "default" (e.g standalone.xml) configurations as well as our "microprofile" configurations (e.g. standalone-microprofile.xml):

MicroProfile Technology	WildFly Full/Default Configurations	WildFly MicroProfile Configuration
MicroProfile Config 3.0	X	X
MicroProfile Fault Tolerance 4.0	—	X
MicroProfile Health 4.0	—	X
MicroProfile JWT Authentication 2.1	X	X
MicroProfile LRA 2.0	—	X
MicroProfile OpenAPI 3.1	—	X
MicroProfile Open Telemetry 1.0	—	X
MicroProfile Reactive Messaging 3.0	—	—
MicroProfile Reactive Streams Operators 3.0	—	—
MicroProfile Rest Client 3.0	X	X

MicroProfile Technology

WildFly Full/Default Configurations

WildFly MicroProfile Configuration

MicroProfile Config 3.0

MicroProfile Fault Tolerance 4.0

—

MicroProfile Health 4.0

—

MicroProfile JWT Authentication 2.1

MicroProfile LRA 2.0

—

MicroProfile OpenAPI 3.1

—

MicroProfile Open Telemetry 1.0

—

MicroProfile Reactive Messaging 3.0

—

MicroProfile Reactive Streams Operators 3.0

—

MicroProfile Rest Client 3.0

Provisioning

We’ve added a new ee-core-profile-server Galleon layer to make it easy to provision a server based on the new Jakarta EE Core Profile introduced in EE 10.
Related to this we’ve introduced new ee-concurrency and ee-integration and servlet Galleon layers. These layers allow a more tailored configuration compared to the existing ee and web-server layers.

Also, separate from WildFly itself, to help users in their migration from Jakarta EE 8 to EE 10 we’ve introduced a separate WildFly Extras project that provides a new Galleon feature pack. The wildfly-deployment-transformer-feature-pack allows you to integrate into a standard WildFly installation the EE 8 to EE 9 deployment transformation functionality that we’ve provided in WildFly Preview since its first release. See the wildfly-deployment-transformer-feature-pack README for documentation on how to use this new feature pack.

Quickstarts

Eduardo Martins and the teams working on server provisioning and cloud have done a significant enhancement to the WildFly quickstarts to deliver a set of Quickstarts which showcase WildFly major enhancements with respect to provisioning, cloud and testing.
We’ve also added a new quickstart that demonstrates connecting to a remote Artemis messaging broker.

Other Treats

The server kernel team has added support for configuration customization using YAML. YAML-based configuration customization is a nice alternative to using CLI scripts to tailor a stock configuration for a particular environment, as there is no need start a CLI process to apply the customization. This makes it well suited to workflows like deploying WildFly using Ansible.
The clustering team has added support for Infinispan query, counters, locks, and CDI.
The clustering and web teams have added support for configuration of an arbitrary cookie to use for web request affinity.
The RESTEasy team has added support for including request tracing information in HTTP response headers.
The messaging-activemq subsystem now supports integrating an SSLContext provided by the elytron subsystem.
When you use OIDC, the security team has added support for identity propagation from a WAR to an EJB in an EAR.
The web team has added default values for the read-timeout and write-timeout settings for Undertow listeners.
We’ve updated Hibernate ORM from the ORM 6.1 release to 6.2.1.

Jakarta EE 10 Support

WildFly 28 is a compatible implementation of the EE 10 Platform as well as the Web Profile and the new Core Profile. WildFly is EE 10 compatible when running on both Java SE 11 and Java SE 17.

Evidence supporting our certification is available in the WildFly Certifications repository on GitHub:

Jakarta EE 10 Full Platform
- SE 11
- SE 17
Jakarta EE 10 Web Profile
- SE 11
- SE 17
Jakarta EE 10 Core Profile
- SE 11
- SE 17

Java SE Support

Our recommendation is that you run WildFly on the most recent long-term support Java SE release, i.e. on SE 17 for WildFly 28. While we do do some testing of WildFly on JDK 20, 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 11 or 17.

WildFly 28 also is heavily tested and runs well on Java 11. We plan to continue to support Java 11 at least through WildFly 29, and likely beyond. We do, however, anticipate removing support for SE 11 sometime in the next 12 to 18 months.

While we recommend using an LTS JDK release, I do believe WildFly runs well on JDK 20. By runs well, I mean the main WildFly testsuite 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 a newer JVM means for their applications to be able to look to WildFly as a useful development platform.

Please note that WildFly runs on Java 11 and later in classpath mode.

Known Issues

Spring and RESTEasy Spring

In WildFly 27, pending the final release of Spring 6, RESTEasy Spring support was removed from standard WildFly, and was only provided with WildFly Preview. With WildFly 28 we have reintroduced RESTEasy Spring support to standard WildFly.

However, we’ve learned of a bug in WildFly 28 that will prevent Spring deployments, including those using RESTEasy Spring, from working. Until this is resolved in WildFly 28.0.1, users can work around this issue by adding a jboss-deployment-structure.xml file to their deployment that declares a dependency on the org.jboss.vfs module.

Release Notes

The full release notes for the release are in the WildFly JIRA. Issues fixed in the underlying WildFly Core 20.0.0 and 20.0.1 releases are listed in the WildFly Core JIRA.

Please try it out and give us your feedback, while we get to work on WildFly 29!

Best regards,

Brian