Book Image

WildFly Cookbook

Book Image

WildFly Cookbook

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (23 chapters)
WildFly Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


In this first chapter, we will describe WildFly's history, its prerequisites, where to get it, and how to install it. We will also explain the standalone and domain running modes, that is, how to run them up.

JBoss.org community is a huge community, where people all over the world develop, test, and document pieces of code. There are a lot of projects in there other than JBoss AS or the recent WildFly such as Infinispan, Undertow, PicketLink, Arquillian, HornetQ, RESTeasy, AeroGear, and Vert.x. For a complete list of all projects, visit the following site: http://www.jboss.org/projects/.

Despite marketing reasons, as there is no preferred project, the community wanted to change the name of the JBoss AS project to something different that would not collide with the community name. The other reason was the Red Hat JBoss supported version named JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP). This was another point towards replacing the JBoss AS name.

How did the community change the name? How would they have decided? Easy—ask us, the community, for new names. The election process started, people from the JBoss Community, JBoss User Group (JBUGs), Java User Group (JUGs), and related communities all over the world, expressed their preferences.

The new name for JBoss AS should have suggested Java application server capabilities and affinities such as integration, cloud, mobile, messaging, nimbleness, strength, open source, free spirit, and so on. You guessed the winner!

"A wild fly is extremely agile, lightweight, untamed and truly free."

The brand new name was announced during the JUDCon 2013 in Brazil. Zzzzhhh... Welcome to WildFly!

Let's talk about the WildFly features and characteristics:

  • WildFly replaces JBoss AS. The first version of WildFly was 8.0, which was based on JBoss AS 7.1. To keep things simple the community decided to keep the same numbering.

  • WildFly has gained the Java EE 7 Full platform compatible implementations badge, which means it has the newest Java technologies. Easy development, better security, better integration, better management!

  • WildFly boots in seconds. All its services start up together, but just the ones that it needs. This is because there is a centralized metadata cache and a modular classloading system, which prevents the famous classpath hell.

  • Another big change is the default web server; WildFly now utilizes Undertow.

    "Undertow is a flexible performant web server written in java, providing both blocking and non-blocking API's based on NIO."

  • It is lightweight, less then 1 MB for its core jar, and less then 4 MB at runtime. Undertow is embeddable, flexible; it supports WebSocket (HTTP upgrade protocols) and Servlet 3.1. Later in the book, we will see how to configure and tune Undertow embedded in WildFly.

  • With this new release of WildFly has been introduced a Role Based Access Control (RBAC) system. This new feature actually gives functionalities to define users, groups and roles. This way you will have not simply a Superuser, but a user to do its proper task without compromising on security. It's highly customizable and it can be integrated with most identity stores such as LDAPs and ADs.

  • WildFly has just one configuration file, so that all your settings are centralized in one place.

  • You can manage your configurations through the Admin Console (also known as Web Console), the Command Line Interface (CLI), the REST API and the Java API. All these tools give great powers to customize your management settings. Within this book we will concentrate mainly on the CLI and the Admin Console.

    Note

    WildFly has been built using Java SE 1.7; thus, it requires you to have at least a JRE version 1.7.

Having said that, let's start for real!

In the following recipes we will see what we need to start JBoss AS, ops, and WildFly, where to get it, what does its folder structure look like, and where to find its configuration files.