Migrate webservices app in Jboss jboss-as-7.1.1.Final to Wildfly

[Said Filali]

Good afternoon,

I am considering migrating an application in java 7 over jboss-as-7.1.1.Final using CXF 2.7.0.

I am considering migrating it to higher versions over java 8 and 11. My question is the version of Wildfly that I should use and that it is as stable as possible. Since I am using a messaging system based on jms on HornetQ 2.2.3. Wildfly comes with Artemis, which is the version of Wildfly to migrate the application.

Thank you so much for your help.

[Brian Stansberry]

We recommend that people use the latest version of WildFly, which currently is WildFly 29.0.1. It is the most up-to-date with respect to bug fixes, including updates of libraries we integrate that have had CVEs. The WildFly project generally doesn't produce micro bug fix releases for major/minor versions older than the most current one.

JBoss AS 7.1.1 is quite old so you may have some application updating work to do, in which case you may be best off using the latest WildFly.

There are a couple other releases to consider if the move to WildFly 29.0.1 is too much:

WildFly 26.1.3 is the last release we have done that supports Jakarta EE 8 and Java SE 8; WildFly 29 supports Jakarta EE 10 and requires SE 11 or later. EE 8 was the last EE release where the EE apis are in the 'javax.*' namespace; now they are all in the 'jakarta.*' namespace. So there is application migration work due to that.

WildFly 24.0.1 is the last release that supports the Picketbox-based security layer that was used in JBoss AS 7. Starting in WildFly 25 only our Elytron security layer is supported, so there is some server configuration migration to be done to move beyond 24. (There are many other configuration changes since AS 7.1.1, but the security layer change is a bigger one than most.

Still we no longer produce bug fix releases for WildFly 24 or 26.1 so I recommend moving to 29.0.1.

Best regards,

Brian