Eclipse MicroProfile and Red Hat Update: Thorntail and SmallRye

During the last three months, there have been some changes regarding Eclipse MicroProfile at Red Hat. If you haven't been following the details, this post recaps what's changed and introduces Thorntail and SmallRye.

Bye-bye WildFly Swarm! Hello Thorntail!

You may have missed this important news. Our MicroProfile implementation changed its name two months ago.

After a lot of feedback from the community, we decided to rename “WildFly Swarm” to Thorntail. While the former name was nice, we found that the “Swarm” term was a bit overloaded in the IT industry and could be confusing. It’s the same for the “WildFly” part; sharing this name with our Java EE application server was a source of confusion for some users, making them think it was a subproject of WildFly.

With the name, we also changed versioning to come back to a more semantic version numbering. Thus the last release version of WildFly Swarm was 2018.5.0 and the first version of Thorntail (same code, different name) was 2.0.0.Final.

Changing the version numbering makes it easier for us to communicate about new features and have better links to downstream project versions.

You’ll find more information on the project renaming and versioning changes in this interview that Bob McWhirter gave to InfoQ.

As it’s still the same project, renaming has no technical impact on existing projects, but you need to change Maven artifacts groupid and artifactid and some plugins name to stick to the new version. All the migration details are listed in the Thorntail 2.0.0.final release notes.

You’ll find everything you need to know about using or contributing to Thorntail at thorntail.io.

Here comes SmallRye, a shared MicroProfile implementation

A few months ago, Ken Finnigan launched a discussion on the MicroProfile mailing list to start an initiative around MicroProfile implementations.

MicroProfile is a fast-moving target and has evolved a lot since it was announced two years ago. Keeping track of this fast evolution in specifications and the matching implementations requires a lot of energy for all vendors, so Ken proposed to put the common parts of these implementation efforts into a single vendor-neutral implementation of MicroProfile, whose project name is SmallRye.

At smallrye.io you can see that this community-driven project is doing well: all MicroProfile specifications now have their own implementation.

Source code can be checked at the SmallRye GitHub repository.

Thorntail, in its 2.1.0.Final version, is the first MicroProfile container to use the SmallRye implementation.

So now, in addition to contributing to all MicroProfile specifications, you can also contribute to an implementation that will benefit the entire community, thanks to SmallRye.

What’s next?

The Thorntail team is working on a lot of nice stuff for the future for the MicroProfile community and Red Hat customers.

For instance, the upcoming Thorntail version will start using Java EE 8 specifications like CDI 2.0 or JAX-RS 2.1 and SmallRye will support MicroProfile 1.4 in its next version.

If you want to stay up to date you can:

• Follow us on Twitter.
• Check our Google group.
• Chat with the other community members on IRC: #Thorntail channel on freenode.

See you around!