[wildfly-dev] Announcing WildFly 8.0.0.Alpha1!

[Jason Greene]

I am happy to formally announce the availability of the first release of WildFly, 8.0.0.Alpha1. The code name is appropriately "WildFly". 

The release is available for download here:

http://wildfly.org/download

As recently announced, this is the first in a series of iterative releases that will be following a monthly cadence, with a goal for delivery in November.

Some notable updates include
- Themes, icons, maven gavs, etc now all say WildFly
- Switched default web container to Undertow 
  (a new non-blocking high-performance web server)
- Significant performance improvements and related features in JPA
- A number of Java EE7 APIs previewed including:
  * JSR-503 (JSON-P)
  * Servlet 3.1
  * JSF 2.2 
  * JSR-356 (Web Sockets)
  * Common Annotations 1.2
  * CDI 1.1
- Support for HTTP tunneling the remote management protocols and JMX
  (A step towards our one-port profile planned for 8)
- Database backed EJB Timers
- CDI beans now allowed in static modules
- Switched to JDK7 (Java EE7 requires)
- Support for coarse deployment ordering dependencies
- Deployment descriptor overrides
- EC2 discovery support for domain mode using S3
- Dropped CMP, JAXR, JSR-88, and JAX-RPC Support (no longer in Java EE)
- Major bundled third-party Updates 
  * Infinispan 5.2.5.Final
  * HornetQ 2.3.0.Final
  * Hibernate 4.2.0.Final
  * Narayana 5.0.0.M2
  * JBossWS-CXF 4.2.0.Beta1

The full list of 314 resolves issues is available here:
https://issues.jboss.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=12313721&version=12321680

As a reminder the main goals that WildFly 8 is targeting are:

- Java EE7
- Patching
- Domain Management Role Based Access Control
- Single Network Port profile
- Runtime performance improvements

If you would like to get involved, come and see us in the #wildfly channel on irc.freenode.org.

Thanks!

--
Jason T. Greene
WildFly Lead / JBoss EAP Platform Architect
JBoss, a division of Red Hat