Introduction
Jakarta Apache Commons is a little unusual in the open source world because of its focus on libraries rather than an actual product. So people here generally get involved because their project uses a commons library and they find a bug, they are frustrated by a lack of documentation, or they need a new feature. Libraries are tricky things to work on because of a very large emphasis on backwards compatibility, stability and minimising minimizing size; lots of discussion and testing often goes on before patches are accepted.
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Patches for bugs, when provided together with a unit test that demonstrates the problem, are also very welcome. Patches that don't have unit tests are much slower to be processed as jakarta commons takes unit testing very seriously, and any code change submitted without a unit test generally means one of the maintainers needs to write the unit test - which is never a lot of fun.
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Look for a project that's already got a reasonably active maintainer base; that's the easiest sort of project to get involved in as there are lots of people around to review any contributions you make and offer feedback (or better still, to commit your patches!). Fixes for bugs that are bothering *you* are most likely to be accepted; documentation updates and enhanced unit tests are also usually pretty welcome. Patches for arbitrary bugs you found listed in bugzilla JIRA are likely to be looked at a little more sceptically as there's no evidence you actually have experience in that area. Offers to implement new features "because it looks like this might be useful" are treated even more cautiously -
unless the project is implementing some kind of specification, and the new feature is just to complete compliance with the spec.
Eventually, if that project uses a commons library and you find a bug or need a new feature you might find yourself contributing to jakarta commons...
As mentioned above, helping out on the user list is also a great way to provide assistance. This may well mean delving into the code or writing test code to try out different scenarios - which will improve your coding skills and knowledge too.
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Sometimes people find that having posted an email or created a bugzilla JIRA entry about a particular commons project there is just no reply.
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If you are an experienced open-source developer with a track record in other open-source groups then please post your details to the commons user or dev mailing list; an exception might be made in your case.
Otherwise you might just have to use an alternative project, or create a "fork" of the current commons project on sourceforge or similar. Where a commons component is dead/dormant, having a user create a fork is considered quite acceptable; in fact if the fork's community flourishes and the developers show good open-source spirit and ability then there is a very good chance that the project would be welcome to merge back into jakarta commons if the developers should choose to do so in the future.
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