WildFly 8 is the direct continuation to the JBoss AS project. The renaming of the community version of JBoss AS was done to reduce confusion between the open source JBoss server, the JBoss community, and the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP). WildFly 8 is free and open source, with support coming from the JBoss community, whereas JBoss EAP is a licensed product that comes with support from RedHat.
The most notable updates in WildFly 8 from earlier versions are as follows:
Java EE7 certification: WildFly is a fully compliant Java EE enterprise server, which means that it provides reference implementations for all Java Specification Requests (JSRs) that make up Java EE 7. JSRs are basically change requests for the Java language. For more information on how JSRs work, refer to https://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/overview.
Arrival of Undertow: JBoss Web has been completely removed and replaced with Undertow. Undertow is a cutting-edge web server that supports non-blocking and blocking handlers, web sockets, and asynchronous servlets. It has been designed for scalability and maximum throughput. It is easy to use, easy to configure, and is highly customizable.
Port Reduction: The number of open ports has been greatly reduced in WildFly. Only two ports are open: 8080 and 9990. This has been achieved by multiplexing protocols over HTTP using the HTTP upgrade feature of Undertow.
Security Manager: You can now configure per-deployment security permissions.
Logging: Several enhancements have been made to WildFly logging. You can now view logfiles via the management interface, define custom formatters, and configure logging per-deployment.
Clustering: Clustering in WildFly is heavily refactored and includes many new features, including web sessions, single sign-on, and mod_cluster support for Undertow. There is also a new public clustering API and new @Stateful EJB caching implementation.
Command-line interface (CLI): You now have the ability to define an alias when connecting to a server, and the CLI GUI has additional functionality allowing you to explore any node in the tree.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Installing the Java environment
Installing WildFly 8
Installing JBoss tools
Exploring the application server filesystem
Understanding the WildFly kernel