Besides ensuring we could certify as Jakarta EE 8 compatible, a lot of effort this summer went into further aligning with the Jakarta community. Specifically, WildFly incorporates a large number of component jars that provide the various EE APIs. For some EE specs WildFly directly provided jars produced by the various Java EE spec projects; for others the JBoss.org community has provided its own jars, derived from source from the Java EE spec projects. For both cases, for WildFly 18 we moved to align the source for our API jars with the source coming from the active Jakarta community.

For projects where we were directly shipping a jar from a Java EE 8 project, we switched to a jar from the equivalent Jakarta project. As a result the Maven groupId and artifactId of these artifacts has changed.

For projects where we were consuming an API jar produced by a JBoss.org community project, for all of those projects a new github repo was created, with the initial code derived from the Jakarta projects, and new releases were produced. For these APIs the Maven groupId and artifactId did not change (except for JTA, where we moved from the 1.2 version of the spec to 1.3, which affected the artifactId ). The new releases have a maven version number one higher than the previous release, but this version bump solely reflects the new origin of the source code. It does not indicate major changes in the source itself.

It’s important to emphasize that the Jakarta EE 8 APIs are API identical to the Java EE 8 APIs and generally the method implementations are identical as well. So this change of the source from which we get the API jars is not expected to introduce any runtime incompatibility. This change is all about aligning the code we provide with projects that are actively maintained.

If you were compiling a deployment project against the Java EE 8 API artifacts we shipped in WildFly 17, that deployment should run fine on WildFly 18.

WildFly provides a number of maven boms for each release. These boms have been updated to use the Jakarta-based dependencies. In addition, the previous boms with maven ids org.wildfly.bom:wildfly-javaee8 and org.wildfly.bom:wildfly-javaee8-with-tools have been discontinued and new boms org.wildfly.bom:wildfly-jakartaee8 and org.wildfly.bom:wildfly-jakartaee8-with-tools have been introduced. Note that this name change does not indicate the WildFly 18 is not a Java EE 8 compatible server. We’re just aligning our names with Jakarta EE.