January 2009 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).
These reports are due here by 12 January 2009 so that the Incubator PMC can relay them to the board.
THIS REPORT IS NOW CLOSED
Your project might need to report even if it is not listed below, please check your own reporting schedule or exceptions.
Please remember to include:
BlueSky has been incubating since 01-12-2008. It is an e-learning solution designed to help solve the disparity in availability of qualified education between well-developed cities and poorer regions of China.
recent activity:
It is nearly the end of this semester. We were busy preparing and taking exams in the past month. So no further progress could we make. We sent our clean version code our mentor, and are waiting for his reverberation.
Top priority:
Droids is a new Incubator project recently arrived from Apache Labs (end October). It's an intelligent standalone robot framework that allows one to create and extend existing web robots.
Things have been quiet this month in Droids. We focus on evolving the design and building a larger community.
PMC Comment: Please include the three (3) items requested by the ASF Board of each report.
Empire-db is a relational data persistence component that aims to overcome the difficulties, pitfalls and restrictions inherent in traditional Object Relational Management (ORM) approaches. Empire-db is on the Apache Incubator since July 2008.
After the acceptance and publication of the first Apache release in October there has been a discussion going on about what would be the most important improvement for the upcoming release. A suggestion was made to provide a Maven like distribution that will allow to access and build Empire-db with Maven instead of the classic .jar file distribution with Ant build files. While the benefits of this suggestion were soon agreed upon on the developer mailing list, this started a long and verbose discussion on how to go about the issue. Ideas ranged from a basic and slow transition to a Maven big bang.
Since the core development team had no experience with Maven it was also necessary to find someone with the skills to get it right. We were happy to find a community member who was capable and willing to perform this task. After different transition models have been discussed he was given the freedom to decide on the most suitable approach. Since then the Maven transition has been going on in a different SVN branch that is planned to be merged with the trunk for the next release.
Besides that the developers participated in discussions and blogs about relational data persistence on non Apache sites such as www.theserverside.com. An interesting article here http://fromapitosolution.blogspot.com/2008/12/criticism-of-java-persistence.html proves that this is still a hot topic with many who could benefit from Emipre-db.
Plans for the future are:
For the transition to a Maven style distribution we were happy to find a new committer for our project. Francis De Brabandere who we believe has excellent Maven skills offered his services and was accepted by the current development team and the mentors.
PMC Comment: A good report, but please include ALL three (3) items requested by the ASF Board of each report.
Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment (ESME) is a secure and highly scalable microsharing and micromessaging platform that allows people to discover and meet one another and get controlled access to other sources of information, all in a business process context.
ESME entered the incubator in 2008-12-02. This report is ESME's first since it joined the incubator and the following items have been performed since its acceptance
The following items are planned for the next reporting period:
PMC Comment: A good report, but please include ALL three (3) items requested by the ASF Board of each report.
2009-January Imperius Incubator status report
Imperius has been incubating since November 2007.
Imperius is a rule-based infrastructure management tool.
Web site:
Code: Development continues on the code base.
Community: Not a lot of activity during the holidays. A couple of patches were provided by a contributor which were committed. Discussion about the first release of Imperius is currently under way.
Plans for the future are:
JSecurity is a powerful and flexible open-source Java security framework that cleanly handles authentication, authorization, enterprise session management and cryptography.
JSecurity has been incubating since June 2008.
At the end of November, the JSecurity team released a final external (non-Apache) release: 0.9.0 final. All modifications after the release were made under the assumption that the next release will be an Apache incubating release.
After the November final release, there has been lengthy discussion for the month and half following about JSecurity's name and whether or not it should be changed to something else. 3 mentors voted in favor of chainging the name to something else, 1 voted against, and 1 abstained. Those voting in favor cited concerns of a few external (3rd party) products that might cause a name conflict. Concensus was not reached, resulting in the vote. However, it is considered still an open issue with continued discussion as other IPMC members are contributing to the discussion.
More recently, the team has debated about how the source tree should be configured to allow easy modular builds and to clearly delineate the differnece of JSecurity core versus web support and 3rd party support. The team came to concensus about an initial directory organization and the ant build files were modified to reflect the new structure. It was also discussed that two build systems, both Ant+Ivy and Maven, could be used to build the framework, allowing the one building to choose based on their preference.
Infrastructure migration (noted in our STATUS file) is almost complete - all that needs to be done is migration of the jsecurity.org website into our incubator snapshot. A volunteer is currently in the process of enabling the existing JSecurity theme in the ASF's Confluence export mechanism.
Low-hanging fruit to be cleared hopefully by the next board report is all IP clearance: the Copyright & Licensing and Distribution Rights sections of the STATUS file should be able to be completed in their entirety.
The biggest exit criteria remaining is Team Collaboration. Although the team is satisfying all collaboration directives and has a good community, we need to attract new committers. Hopefully that will be a significant difference in the upcoming months and throughout 2009.
Finally, one of our mentors, Alex Karasulu, had to step down and remove himself as a mentor, citing busy schedules and not enough time to dedicate (http://markmail.org/message/hkh6pjwjlnmtkrjp). We are very grateful for the time he was able to contribute!
The project team is not considering graduation at this point, as the code is not ready for an Apache release. Once IP clearance is complete, we'll attempt our first incubator release.
The status is being maintained in SVN here
2009 January JSPWiki Incubator status report
JSPWiki has been incubating since September 2007.
JSPWiki is a JSP-based wiki program.
During the past three months, the JSPWiki community has increased somewhat, but the growth seems to level off. The developer list now has 72 names, a modest increase from 66 the last time, and the user list is now 157 people strong, five more than three months ago.
JSPWiki 2.8 (an Apache-licensed version of 2.6) was made successfully, and even a couple of bugfix releases have been done. This means that work on the 3.0 - the first Apache-branded release - is currently strongly underway.
A minor problem was encountered when a widespread bug in Jasper means that we cannot use our initial choice of "org.apache.jspwiki" as the package name without sacrificing compatibility with the majority of servlet containers. The community is still debating a couple of options.
Graduation depends on:
Quiet month with little progress due to vacation period.
Lucene.Net has been in incubation since April 2006
Lucene.Net is a source code, class-per-class, API-per-API and algorithmatic port of the Java Lucene search engine to the C# and .NET platform utilizing Microsoft .NET Framework.
Lucene.Net has seen positive activities over the past 3 (or even 6 months), the key highlights are:
Olio has been incubating since September 2008.
Olio is a web 2.0 toolkit to help developers evaluate the suitability, functionality and performance of various web technologies by implementing a reasonably complex application in several different technologies.
of system infrastructure, software application stack, etc.
OpenWebBeans will be an ASL-licensed implementation of the Web Beans Specification which is defined as JSR-299.
OpenWebBeans entered the incubator in October 26, 2008. The following items have been made after the second report
2009-January Sanselan Incubator status report
Sanselan has been in incubation since September 2007.
Sanselan is a pure-java image library for reading and writing a variety of image formats.
The community hasn't grown much in the past three months. There continues to be only one active committer. Participation level is low.
The first official Apache release occurred on July 30th, 2008. A new release has just been prepared and is current being voted upon.
The new release includes significant bug fixes, better documentation, better IPTC and XMP support (metadata) and improvements to the release structure.
Barriers to graduation continue to be diversity, size of the community, and overall activity.
Stonehenge has been incubating since December 2008. Since the last report there has been a contribution of code from Microsoft. All nominated committers have submitted CLAs and are now authorized. Apart from that activity has been slow over the holiday period.
Our next steps are to start working towards a first milestone release.
Tashi has been incubating since September 2008.
The Tashi project aims to build a software infrastructure for cloud computing on massive internet-scale datasets (what we call Big Data). The idea is to build a cluster management system that enables the Big Data that are stored in a cluster/data center to be accessed, shared, manipulated, and computed on by remote users in a convenient, efficient, and safe manner.
Activity has been slow over the holidays.
The JIRA has been set up and is being used.
Work has begun on integration between the Tashi scheduler and DHCP and DNS servers.
Items to be resolved before graduation:
Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between a variety of programming languages. Thrift entered the Apache Incubator in May 2008.
Recent Activity:
Issues before Graduation:
UIMA is a component framework for the analysis of unstructured content such as text, audio and video. UIMA entered incubation on October 3, 2006.
Some recent activity:
Items to complete before graduation:
Incubator Project - VCL Status for December 2008 - January 2009
Included is the monthly status report for VCL to the Incubator PMC for January 2009
The community has been active on the vcl-dev mailing list. Some new interested parties have subscribed and open discussion about goals, development processes, etc. have been happening.
There has been some discussion about the use of the project name VCL as NC State is still using this name for their student computing lab. The issue was raised about whether this is acceptable or not. This issue should be resolved before the next board report.
Code has been committed and folks are getting accustomed to the structure and layout of the VCL architecture.
No issues at this time.