Wildfly Swarm, towards maturity and a small contribution
Posted by: Paris Apostolopoulos  in Enterprise Java January 22nd, 2016

One of the projects I follow lately, is Wildfly Swarm. Eventually my request during this year’s Devoxx in the JBoss BOF, to consider changing the name of the project, did not go through (due to the conflict with the famous Docker Swarm).
So what is Wildfly Swarm?
Simply put, is the Wildfly application server (app server of choice for many devs -including me), split into in several pieces – (modules or fractions as they are called), and made available to any developer to use them  and assemble a new modular solution. You wont have to bundle or install the whole app server any more, just the layers and functionality you want. You can pick from a list of several sub-modules those that your application is going to leverage, pull their dependencies and assemble your final jar application along with your code. The model resembles a lot on what many teams and developers out there do with Spring Boot.
Wildfly and modularity –  ahead of it’s time 
One side note, is that Wildfly is one of the few application servers that invested on it’s modularity and related infrastructure long before other technologies or containers emerged. The JBoss/ Wildfly code base through out these years, changed a lot towards providing a flexible core with plug-gable modules and this is something we need to give credit to their development and design team for many years now. If you have worked on any project using Wildfly or JBoss  you are already exposed to it’s modules architecture and the simplified class and library loading features. So the application server and  components were already modular by design and constructs, the only thing missing is to make it official and provide some extra tools and APIs to the end developer – to fully leverage this ability. That is Wildfly Swarm. The development is still ongoing. The official site can be found here, a long list of examples and code can be found here, the official documentation can be found here, twitter account here, and the mailing list can be found here.
