[undertow-dev] Undertow 3.0 Announcement

[Stuart Douglas]

The Java network programming world has come a long way since Undertow was
first started. Netty has emerged as the de-facto standard for network
programming in Java, and the Undertow team has decided that the benefits of
utilising Netty outweigh any benefits in keeping our XNIO based transport
layer.

Undertow 3.0 will keep Undertow’s programming model, however the underlying
transport will be changed from XNIO to Netty. We will also use the Netty
HTTP/1, HTTP/2 and Websocket implementations. We believe this change will
have a number of advantages:


   -

   It will allow other Netty based services (e.g GRPC) to share the same
   HTTP port
   -

   It allows sharing of threads between Undertow and other Netty based
   services, resulting in services using less resources
   -

   The underlying transport implementation are the most complex part of
   Undertow, delegating this to Netty will significantly reduce the work
   needed to maintain Undertow


As part of this Flavia Rainone will be taking over as project lead from
Stuart Douglas so he can focus on the recently announced Quarkus project,
however Stuart will continue to be heavily involved in Undertow for the
foreseeable future.

Flavia Rainone has been involved in JBoss community since 2002 and has an
extensive background on Remoting and Xnio. In the past years, she acted as
EJB component lead for WildFly,  besides contributing to several projects
in WildFly, such as IronJacamar, JBoss MSC and XNIO, and also Byteman. All
this makes her a good fit for taking over Undertow leadership.


What does this mean for me?

What this means for you will depend on which parts of Undertow you are
using:


   -

   If you are using the Servlet API then you will likely not notice any
   change. You will need some different dependencies (Netty instead of XNIO),
   however the rest of the experience should be mostly identical
   -

   If you are using the low level Undertow HttpHandler and
   HttpServerExchange and you want to use Undertow 3.0 then you will need to
   migrate your application. For the most part this migration should be
   straightforward, as most concepts from the old API directly map to the new
   API.


Road Map

2.x

The existing Undertow 2.x branch will continue to be maintained for the
foreseeable future. It will receive bug and security fixes, and some
features, however it is unlikely to receive any more low level transport
oriented features (e.g. HTTP/3 support). For now it is a perfectly valid
choice to stay on Undertow 2 while the new Netty based implementation
matures.

3.x

A 3.0 final version should be released in the next few months, however in
the short term the 3.x branch will not provide the same level of API
compatibility that Undertow has traditionally provided. As the Netty
implementation is new this will allow us to potentially fix any issues we
find with our approach without being locked in to supporting an API that is
not ideal.

This is a great time to try out the new API and report and problems or
suggestions. Note that this is explicitly referring to the core
HttpServerExchange based API, no major plans are expected to the Servlet
API (i.e. ServletExtension and DeploymentInfo).

4.x

After a short 3.x cycle we are planning on releasing a 4.x that will
provide API stability, in the same way that Undertow 1.x and 2.x have.

How can I contribute

You can contribute to Undertow in the same way it has always been done.

We have an email list open for discussion here: undertow-dev at lists.jboss.org

Jira issues can be accessed here:
https://issues.jboss.org/projects/UNDERTOW/issues

And source code for 3.x is here:
https://github.com/undertow-io/undertow/tree/3.0.x

Also, with the move from HipChat to Zulip in Wildfly team, you can now
access Undertow stream via Zulip at https://wildfly.zulipchat.com/
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