Today Red Hat released JBoss EAP 7.0 BETA. This is the culmination of a couple of years of hard work by the JBoss EAP team at Red Hat and the broader WildFly community. I would like to thank them for their dedication and hard work and offer congratulations on achieving another huge milestone and major step forward in establishing Open Source in the enterprise and JBoss EAP as the open source standard for Java EE.

JBoss EAP 7 is a significant release in every respect; the last major EAP release (EAP 6.0) was back in June, 2012 and after 4 minor feature releases and numerous patch releases, EAP 6 is now just 8 months away from entering its long-term maintenance phase. While EAP 6 will be fully supported for many years to come – all new development and new features will target EAP 7 and beyond.

While Java EE 7 brings a major set of new features to EAP 7 (see below) it’s only a small part of what defines JBoss EAP 7. There are many other major updates in the release to help us keep up with demands of our customers, industry trends and align with other Red Hat products and initiatives.

New high-performance web subsystem based on Undertow – supporting Servlet 3.1, WebSockets, HTTP Upgrade

Undertow can also be deployed standalone as a lightweight, scalable proxy / load-balancer.

Move from JacORB to the standard OpenJDK ORB

New high-performance messaging subsystem based on Apache ActiveMQ Artemis – same searing performance as HornetQ with expanded protocol support and Artemis is now the standard message broker for all JBoss products.

Support for Java EE 7 – full and web-profile and Java SE 8.

Enhanced (JSR-352) batch support – including cluster support, management (liste, start, stop, resume) of batch jobs and IDE (JBDS 9.0) integration

Improved upgrade experience from previous versions of EAP / WildFly and better support for competitive migrations using Windup.

Improved JNDI, EJB, JMS and WS interoperability between EAP 7 and older versions – useful for side-by-side upgrades.

Ability to manage EAP 6 domain hosts and servers

Improved management console; easier navigation, and much better support for large scale domain configurations.

Graceful shutdown – allows servers to quiesce without aborting in-flight requests or transactions

Also the following features are available as Technical Preview :

A new JGroups based DistributedWorkManager

Execute JavaScript (using JDK8’s Nashorn), access JNDI and invoke CDI and JPA EntityBeans from JavaScript

HTTP 2.0 – connection multiplexing, header compression and server push

Major enhancements to Java EE 7 include :

Websockets – JSR-356

JSON Processing – JSR-353

Concurrent Utils for Java EE – JSR-236

Batch Processing – JSR-352

JAX-RS 2.0 – JSR-339

Servlet 3.1 – JSR-340

JMS 2.0 – JSR-343

A more detailed refresher on on Java EE 7 features here.

As always – you can download the BETA via the Red Hat Customer Portal or from JBossDeveloper if you don’t have access. Release notes are here. And you’ll need some developer tooling to go with that – JBDS 9.0 is available for download here.

Give the BETA a try and give the team some feedback.