More than 5 years ago, in early 2015, Bob McWhirter and Ken Finnigan started a research project to answer one question: what would it take to disassemble WildFly into small pieces and package only the necessary ones, together with an application, into one uberjar. That project was called WildFly Swarm and it quickly became popular.

Over the years, WildFly Swarm became the Just Enough App Server, invented hollow JARs, helped bootstrap MicroProfile, became a Red Hat supported product, morphed into Thorntail, started the 4.x prototype, and eventually became surpassed by Quarkus.

The WildFly folks didn’t rest on their laurels either: WildFly 19 brought full MicroProfile 3.3 support, based on the same SmallRye components that Thorntail uses, they built a standalone feature pack for MicroProfile reactive specifications, again using SmallRye components, and there’s also a Maven plugin in the works to create WildFly uberjars. It is based on the Galleon provisioning framework, so it allows you to select which parts of WildFly you want, just like with Thorntail.

With Quarkus reaching 1.0.0.Final last year and WildFly growing to accommodate Thorntail use cases, there’s no need for Thorntail anymore. There will be no more Thorntail releases after 2.7.0.Final – unless a critical bug is found in the coming few months, in which case we might produce a small bugfix release.

We recommend users to migrate to either Quarkus, or WildFly. Quarkus should be a perfect fit for most Thorntail applications. It includes many of the same libraries and APIs, such as JAX-RS with RESTEasy, JPA with Hibernate, JTA with Narayana, MicroProfile with SmallRye and many more. Quarkus also offers an awesome development mode and ahead of time compilation to native binaries using GraalVM. See quarkus.io to learn more.

However, if your Thorntail application relies on technologies such as EJB, JSF, JCA, SOAP web services, or CORBA, WildFly is a better choice.

Since this is the end, it’s appropriate to look back. And there’s noone better than the founders themselves:

Thorntail (née WildFly Swarm) was a way to leverage a relatively non-microservices-centric codebase (WildFly) to support microservices. Figuring out how to misuse and abuse the very … robust … WildFly project was a lot of fun. Seeing the community embrace WildFly Swarm/Thorntail and continue it was amazing. The various people within and outside of Red Hat who contributed and brought it to where it is today have been awesome. I’m glad to see quite a few of the lessons learned from Thorntail make their way into Quarkus, and I have no reason to think Quarkus won’t continue to fill Thorntail’s shoes.

With a hint of sadness, it’s now time to say farewell to Thorntail. It was a wonderful experience to create it with Bob, and see the team and project grow over the ensuing years. Thorntail (née WildFly Swarm) was our first foray into the world of microservice frameworks, and a lot of the ideas we had in Thorntail have been incorporated into Quarkus. Lastly, I’d like to thank the Thorntail community for their ideas, support, and encouragement over the years.

Red Hat build of Thorntail