WildFly Jakarta EE and legacy projects

Question

We have Java EE 8 EAR made up of different modules/projects. It is currently running on WildFly 19.0.0 Final however we're thinking to move it on the latest WildFly (Jakarta EE). If I understand correctly from version 21.0.0 WildFly is 100% Jakarta EE Full & Web distribution and should we want to move to jakarta ee all we have to do is to change the dependency javaee-api to jakarta.jakartaee-api and update all our imports from javax.* to jakarta.* Is that correct?

1. Can we run our application as-is on WildFly >= 21.0.0 or is it compulsory for us to recompile it with jakarta dependencies?

2. Because some of the sub-projects are legacy (ie they have javax.* imports) Is it possible to build a single EAR where some sub-projects have javax.* imports whereas others have jakarta.* imports?

In general what's the best way to deal with a scenario where some sub-projects of our EAR are legacy (ie they have javax.* imports) whereas other can be migrated to jakarta dependencies & imports?

Thanks

Answer 1

WildFly 21 is JakartEE 8 compliant which is basically the same as JavaEE 8 except for the Intellectual Property so you don't have to change anything. This will be the case also for WildFly 22. As far as I know the idea is to provide 2 different distributions like what was done with JavaEE 8.

WildFly provides a JakartaEE 9 preview with WildFly 22 Alpha but that is a different distribution. That last part can 'transform' your bytecode provided you use managed deployment otherwise you would have to rebuild your project with the new packages.