The wait is over: JBoss Web Server 5 with Tomcat 9 is here!

We are excited to announce the general availability of Red Hat JBoss Web Server 5.0 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the technology preview of transactions processing with Narayana. JWS 5 is available through zip, RPM, Maven repository, and the Red Hat Container Catalog.

Red Hat JBoss Web Server combines market-leading open source technologies with enterprise capabilities to provide a single solution for large-scale websites and lightweight web applications. It combines the world's most deployed web server (Apache) with the top servlet engine (Tomcat) and excellent support for middleware (ours).

Main Components

• Apache Tomcat

  • A servlet container in accordance with the Java Servlet Specification. JBoss Web Server contains Apache Tomcat 9.

• The Apache Tomcat Native Library

  • A Tomcat library, which improves Tomcat scalability, performance, and integration with native server technologies.

• The tomcat-vault

  • An extension for the JBoss Web Server used for securely storing passwords and other sensitive information used by a JBoss Web Server.

• The mod_cluster library

  • A library that allows communication between Apache Tomcat and the Apache HTTP Server’s mod_proxy_cluster module. This allows the Apache HTTP Server to be used as a load balancer for JBoss Web Server.

New Features and Enhancements

Based on the new and shiny Tomcat 9.0.7:

- HTTP/2 Support
- Servlet 4.0 Specification
- OpenSSL for TLS with JSSE connectors (NIO and NIO2)
- NIO connector is the default for HTTP/1.1 when tomcat-native is installed
- TLS virtual hosting (SNI) support

Also these enhancements:

- Support for embedded distributions (fat jar deployments)
- Asynchronous support NIO2
- Transactions processing through Narayana and DBCP2 (tech preview)
- System daemon integration scripts provided for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux users installing from .zip archives
- The tomcat-vault installation process has been improved
- The vault.properties file for tomcat-vault can be stored outside JWS_HOME
- Change in manager and host-manager webapp behavior
- Change to mod_cluster 1.4 - a connector needs to be specified
- Allows the configuration of multiple properties files
- Logging JBoss Web Server with log4j deprecated
- Tomcat embedded included in the Red Hat JBoss Web Server 5.0 maven repository

Introducing Narayana (Technical Preview)

Narayana on JBoss Web Server is currently in a technical preview status and has no official accompanying documentation at this time.

The Narayana transactions tookit provides support for applications developed using the following standards-based transaction protocols:

• JTA
• JTS
• Web-Service Transactions
• REST Transactions
• STM
• XATMI/TX

Narayana on JBoss Web Server is being developed for integration with Red Hat Process Automation Manager. Narayana on JBoss Web Server also provides a connection with PostgreSQL servers using a Tomcat JDBC connection pool.

For more information, see the JBoss Web Server documentation.