What community version of Jboss is recommended for jdk 1.7 and why

Question

I need to migrate from Jboss 5.1.0 GA to any other that supports jdk 1.7. I'm currently using jboss 5.1 with seam 2, jdk 1.6 and sqlserver 2008 r2.

What community version of Jboss is recommended for jdk 1.7 and why?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You can actually get JBoss AS 5.1.0 GA to run on JDK 7, see JBAS-6981. All of the following options will work with JDK 7:

• JBoss AS 5.1.0 (plus the fix for JBAS-6981)
• JBoss AS 6.1.0
• JBoss AS 7.1.1
• JBoss EAP 6.2
• WildFly AS 8 CR 1

The right solution depends on your situation:

• The simplest solution with the least risk is to stay with JBoss AS 5.1.0 and fix JBAS-6981 yourself. We did that and ran with it for over a year and it worked fine. Note however that JBoss AS 5.1.0 is end of life, eg. there aren't any security patches available.
• If you don't want to fix JBAS-6981 yourself you can go with JBoss AS 6.1.0. This should be quite a simple migration because it builds on the same architecture and has the same disk layout. Note however that it is Java EE 6 which means among other things standardized JNDI names. Depending on your application this can have quite a bit impact — or none at all. Note however that JBoss AS 6.1.0 is end of life, eg. there aren't any security patches available.
• The next "stable" community version is JBoss AS 7.1.1 with brings a whole new architecture. Depending on your application that can be quite a large migration — or a really simple one. However I would recommend against JBoss AS 7.1.1 as it's buggy as hell. Note there won't be any future releases for JBoss AS 7.1.1 as well.
• JBoss EAP 6.2 builds on JBoss AS 7.1.1 (AS 7.3 actually) and contains many bug fixes (and some features). You either need to build it from source or get a license from Red Hat. There will be patches for EAP 6.2.
• The current in development community version is WildFly AS 8 CR1. As you can see from the version name there isn't a stable release yet. And it contains a whole new servlet engine, which makes a whole lot of people nervous. I would only use it if you have really good integration tests.

I don't know what the situation regarding Seam is for any of them.

Note that sooner or later you'll have to migrate to a newer version of JBoss AS anyway. To judge how hard the migration will be you first need to know what dependencies on JBoss AS you have in your code.