Chapter 4. Features

The Red Hat build of Thorntail for s390xand ppc64le platform is supported only in OpenShift environments provisioned on IBM Z and IBM Power Systems infrastructure. Running an Thorntail application on a stand-alone installation of RHEL on IBM Zand IBM Power Systems is not supported.

Eclipse OpenJ9 Java images for IBM Z and IBM Power Systems and new images for products supported on IBM Z and IBM Power Systems are available in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog.

To deploy the example applications on OpenShift environments provisioned on IBM Z and IBM Power Systems infrastructure, specify the relevant IBM Z and IBM Power Systems image name in the pom.xml file and commands.

Some of the example applications also require other products, such as Red Hat Data Grid to demonstrate the workflows. In this case, you must also change the image names of these products to their relevant IBM Z and IBM Power Systems image names in the YAML file of the example applications.

Use the OpenShift Maven plugin to deploy your Thorntail applications on OpenShift. The Fabric8 Maven plugin is no longer supported. For more information, see the section migrating from Fabric8 Maven Plugin to Eclipse JKube.

You can add metering labels to your Thorntail pods and check Red Hat subscription details with the OpenShift Metering Operator.

Thorntail should use the following metering labels:

See Metering documentation for more information.

For more information on labels, see Understanding how to update labels on nodes.

A new fraction hibernate is available. This fraction provides the same functionality as jpa fraction. Additionally the hibernate fraction provides dependencies on the correct versions of Hibernate artifacts. If you use Hibernate APIs in your applications, you can use this fraction to manage the Hibernate versions instead of managing them manually.

The filterWebInfLib configuration option introduces a new value uberjar-only. When this value is specified, only the WAR file inside the uberjar is repackaged. The standalone WAR file is not modified.

You can use the uberjar-only option when you want to create both, an uberjar for self-contained deployment, and a standalone WAR for deployment to an application server.

This release of Thorntail introduces the following feature upgrades:

This section lists the components that are updated in Thorntail releases.

The Red Hat Maven repository has been included in the set of default Maven repositories that Thorntail uses to download artifacts.

If you use a Maven repository proxy, such as Nexus, add https://maven.repository.redhat.com/ga/ to the list of proxy repositories.

When you set an environment variable or system property to <<null>>, the corresponding Thorntail configuration property is set to null.

In releases prior to Thorntail 2.7.0, you could not set the configuration property to null using environment variables or system properties. The configuration property would always be set to the string value of the environment variable or system property, which could be an empty string, or the "null" string, or any other string.

There is a change in how SmallRye Config treats empty values.

If you specify an empty string as a value for a MicroProfile Config configuration property, it is now treated as a missing value.

In previous releases, an empty string was treated as an empty value, which led to inconsistent behavior. For example, an empty string interpreted as an array would become an empty array, but a string "," interpreted as an array would become an array of 2 empty strings.