JBoss is now WildFly

Red Hat's announcement in October 2012 of plans to rename JBoss, its widely used Java application server, was met with great surprise – after all, everything that is developed and sold using the JBoss brand has its roots in the name of the open source application server originally launched in 1999. However, now that "JBoss" is tied to the community portal JBoss.org, the application server itself, and the company's middleware products, Red Hat decided to institute the strategy of clear differentiation that has already been used for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The hope is that confusion will be minimised for customers.

And now the new name has been revealed – the JBoss application server will be known as WildFly from now on. The name is the result of a survey and voting process that took place late last year and is intended to reflect the server's "extremely agile, lightweight, untamed and truly free" nature. According to Mark Little, Red Hat/JBoss vice-president, the community suggested more than 2,000 names; after they were checked for trademark issues, five candidates ended up on the short list before the new name was chosen and was formally presented at JUDCon (JBoss Users and Developers Conference) Brazil.

(fab)