And I must say that I'm impressed!

There has been a huge speed-up in the most areas. It seems like all the different components have been integrated much more efficient. This is also reflected in the installation process: everything is much easier than with r8.1. Thereby not saying that it's easy, just that it's easier .

When that's said there are still some remarks. For instance there's no documentation how to protect the Management Console if Siteminder is not installed, and encountering the fact that Siteminder itself if a quite comprehensive product, that's not satisfactory! They could just as well include a small guide in protecting the JBoss directory/application - it's really just editing four files or so, but for JBoss-infamiliar people it can be quite disincentive.

In order to overcome the slow-down in TEWS, a threaded solution can be made. In r8.1 only 15 threads were stable (in our environment) - or else TEWS would crash. In r12 I've succesfully used as much as 30 without experiencing instability. That's quite impressive!

There are more praise and more criticism to say about the new release 12, but in general I'm happy with it.