- Hi, I'm Cameron McKenzie.
I'm the Editor In Chief over at theserverside.com.
You can follow me over on Twitter,
please do Cameron at MCNZ,
And I want to talk to you about the differences between
JBoss and WildFly.
And the fact of the matter is
there's really not a huge number of differences.
I mean, there's more similarities between the two
than there are differences, right?
They're both open source.
They're both Java based.
They both provide Jakarta EE compatibility.
They're both community supported.
They're both widely adopted.
They're both Red Hat projects.
So what's the difference?
Well, the difference is this,
WildFly is the open source project,
community-based project that people contribute to,
to build JBoss EAP, essentially.
It's the open source project.
It's all the, where all the code contributions go.
JBoss EAP, what people typically think of as JBoss,
that's the commercially supported server by Red Hat.
That's the one that you pay for
if you go with that subscription-based model
and you know, you get support from, from Red Hat
for your application server,
but JBoss EAP, the commercially supported application server
is just built from WildFly.
WildFly's essentially the testing ground for JBoss EAP.
Maybe you can think of it as an incubator for new features,
but JBoss is just built from WildFly.
Now, part of the confusion over this is the fact that
previously JBoss EAP was built from a project
called JBoss AS.
EAP stands for enterprise application platform.
AS just stands for application server.
Now, JBoss AS and JBoss EAP are so similar in names that
differentiating between them was a pain.
So after version seven of JBoss AS,
Red Hat just said, look, we're calling it WildFly,
we're not calling it JBoss AS anymore.
There's going to be WildFly, which is JBoss AS.
There's going to be WildFly,
and there's going to be JBoss EAP.
There won't be any JBoss AS anymore.
So WildFly is just the renaming, the rebranding
of the old JBoss AS project.
And, you know, to proof of that,
the last version of JBoss AS, last full increment,
was version seven.
The first full increment of WildFly was version eight,
they were just saying, hey, WildFly is picking up
from where JBoss AS left off.
So that's the key difference, so as you can imagine,
there's more similarities between them
than there are differences.
They're both supported by Red Hat,
they're both JBoss projects,
they both are written in Java, the same language,
they both actually have an LG,
a lesser new license to them so they have the same license
but the big difference is
you're not getting commercial support from,
for WildFly from JBoss,
you have to go with a JBoss application server.
I think there's some minor details
with support for MicroProfile.
I think WildFly's MicroProfile support out of the box,
where as JBoss applications server,
it's an extension pack you have to add on,
but just working with the tools, I mean,
that was the only major thing I could find,
but yeah, but that's about it, you know,
for the most part, you know, WildFly and JBoss,
they're more similar than they are different.
WildFly is basically the open source project
that we work on and incubate new features,
where as when everything's good
and we want to push out a brand new release
with all of the features tested and verified,
and then provide commercial support for it,
well that product produced by Red Hat is JBoss EAP
or what we kind of now just colloquially think of as JBoss.
And there you go.
If you want to learn more head over to the serverside.com
and please follow me on Twitter at cameronmcnz.