This article is more than 1 year old

Red Hat renames JBoss application server as WildFly

New effort to focus on Java EE 7 certification

After tallying the votes in a naming contest that kicked off in October 2012, leading Linux vendor Red Hat has announced that the product formerly known as the JBoss Application Server (AS) will henceforth be known as WildFly.

"WildFly represents both a brand refresh for the project and a renewal of its vision to drive the next generation of application server technologies," the company said in a canned statement on Monday.

The new name was arrived at via a public vote in late 2012, with members of the JBoss community were asked to choose one of five new monikers that had been submitted by the public. In addition to WildFly, other candidates included BaseJump, jBeret, Petasos, and Jocron.

According to Red Hat's contest page, the name WildFly was suggested because "a wild fly is extremely agile, lightweight, untamed and truly free."

In October, Red Hat said that it wanted to change the name of JBoss AS because the project had evolved considerably from its early roots as a Java EE application server. In particular, JBoss currantly encourages developers to use frameworks other than Java EE, such as Spring, and non-Java languages that run on the JVM, such as Clojure and Scala.

According to the new WildFly FAQ, not much else about JBoss AS is going to change, other than its name. WildFly will continue to be available as a free download, and the WildFly open source project will remain the upstream project for Red Hat's commercial JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

WildFly will even retain its version numbering from JBoss AS – so, since the most recent JBoss AS release is version 7, the first iteration of the new project will be WildFly 8.

Red Hat says the main focus of that effort will be on "earning rapid certification of the Java EE 7 specification," which includes support for WebSockets and improvements to Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI).

The company says the first, alpha-quality build of the new release will be made available next month, via the new WildFly homepage. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like