April2006

This page contains monthly reports to the ASF Board of Directors from incubator projects that have to report this month. You can also see the overall quarter report for 1st Quarter 2006.

ActiveMQ

The ActiveMQ project is progressing toward graduation and things are moving along well. Below are the highlights of activity on the project:

• Added Nabble forums as an alternative to ASF mailing lists
• Added Nathan Mittler as a committer
• Working on the ActiveMQ 4.0 RC2 release candidate
• Currently working to accept a donation from Amazon for the ActiveMQ C++ API
  

ADF Faces

ADF Faces incubation has started in the last weeks. The code repository has been setup, the committer access has been granted, we are now waiting for an import of a current code drop into the repository.

This will take some time as all package names are changed over to an Apache like structure, and the ASL license is adopted as mentioned in the proposal.

Mailing lists have been setup, and mailing list traffic is slowly picking up steam.

Agila

AltRMI

Cayenne

The Cayenne project is setting up its infrastructure. Existing mailing lists were successfully migrated to Apache this month and are remain active. All but one ICLA have been recorded and account requests submitted. We are also working on getting our JIRA migration done and are hoping to be part of the Confluence-as-a-document-editor trial.

We are preparing our last non-Apache release (1.2, currently in beta). Our first step after this release will be to repackage everything to the org.apache.cayenne namespace and release a new "apache" version to indicate backwards compatibility will no longer be maintained.

We also have at least one LGPL issue, which is with a non-essential optional platform binary build (Launch4J). This is a relatively-new feature (the ability to run the Cayenne Modeler as a native binary) and, worse case, we can remove the feature to get rid of the dependency. However, a number of potential replacements with compatible licenses have been identified and will be evaluated as a first attempt to solve the issue.

Felix

• Entire Felix build process migrated to Maven (M2).
  
• Mangen contributed by Rob Walker for managing bundle dependencies
  

• Several of the UPnP peeps are now committers and contributions have made their way into the repo with respective [C]CLAs.
  

• Preparing for an initial release from the incubator
  
• OSGi Alliance re-licensed R4 sources as ASL, not just ASL-compatible.
  
• Worked with OSGi CTO BJ Hargrave to commit R4 core and compendium ASL sources to Felix repo with M2 build/deployment.
  
• Wire Admin and Service Binder contributed and Humberto Cervantes a committer.
  
• Migrated Service Binder and related tutorial/examples to Felix repo with M2 build/deployment.
  
• Dependency Manager contributed and Marcel Offermans a committer. Additionally, Xenotron patch contribution by Peter Neubauer.
  
• Created daemons and installers with nice packaging for soon to be released initial versions
  
• Committed new OSGi Bundle Repository service, which is an OSGi Alliance sanctioned bundle repository based on previous OBR work.
  
• Committed two new shell-related bundles, Shell GUI and Shell GUI Plugins, that provide a simple GUI front end for Felix.
  
• PPMC is starting to estabilish policy around committership and membership (showing its autonomous nature)
  
• Upayavira became a new mentor an has greatly accellerated the project
  
• Many new committerss:
  ** Francesco Furfari
  ** Stefano Lenzi
  ** Rob Walker
  ** Marcel Offermans
  ** Matteo Demuru
  ** Humberto Cervantes
  ** Karl Pauls
  

Quoting Upayavira: "Now, that shows signs of a healthy community. Adding seven committers in one quarter "

I happen to agree this project is coming along very nicely.

Graffito

• We are still working on our JCR support. This support is mainly done with an object/Content mapping. We hope to finalize the first release of this subproject for the ASF Europe Conf. This tools could be use in other open source project.
  
• Sword Technologies is working on the workflow service and the first Graffito module (personalized news management with syndication). The code will be donate in May to the ASF.
  
• Still working with the Jetspeed team to see how to build a common release for the ASF Europe Conf.
  
• We want to promote and make some "marketing" to increase the community size.
  

Harmony

Harmony is going well, so well that it is not easy to sum up all the things happening. There is, however, currently nothing requiring board or incubator PMC attention. Highlights for the last quarter:

• no releases.
• We have welcomed one new PPMC member:
  • Tim Ellison
    
• we have welcomed three new committers:
  • Mikhail Loenko
  • George Harley
  • Stepan Mishura and expect to add quite a few more in the next quarter.
    
• we have received and processed several more bulk contributions from
  different parties, including for beans, regex, math, jndi, logging, prefs,
  sql, math(again), crypto, and rmi (twice), hundreds upon hundreds of unit
  tests, an eclipse plugin for doing harmony development, and more. Our
  framework for accepting these contributions (based on jira, svn, and faxes
  and documented on the harmony website) seems to be working well.
  
• there was concern over a potential copyright infringement within our JCHEVM
  component. This concern has been addressed by receiving a code donation for
  the potentially infringing files, without having to resort to lawyers and to
  the mutual satisfaction of all parties and under the watchful eye of the
  Incubator PMC.
  
• we have begun collaborating with the SableVM community, which has relicensed
  its VM under the ALv2 (the related previous potential licensing/copyright
  issues have been resolved without having to resort to lawyers and to the
  mutual satisfaction of all parties and under the watchful eye of the
  Incubator PMC).
  
• we have seen a lot of discussion on how to do testing, how to use jira, etc
  etc, as more and more developers gear up to contribute to the project. These
  kinds of discussions are going well and the collaborative consensus-based
  process is emerging.
  
• we have identified the (future) need for some serious build and testing
  server infrastructure but have not approached the infrastructure team about
  this yet. IBM is currently hosting a Maven Continuum server to run the
  harmony tests, and sending the results to our mailing lists.
  
  

JuiCE

Good activity in the previous quarter. Werner Dittman was voted in as a committer and has been refactoring the initial code into a more long term format. A test build has also been created on a Win32 platform.

The team involved in this are all committers on the xml-security project. Over the next quarter we will be looking to promote this from the Incubator into the xml project as a part of xml-security.

Kabuki

Now that the initial committer list has their Apache accounts, the project will be beginning real soon now. No other news to report at this time.

log4net

The log4net team is putting together release 1.2.10. The release has been approved by the Logging PMC and is now waiting for approval by the Incubator PMC. This release includes a number of fixes for the current 1.2.9 release. One of these is a fix for a security issues that was raised through security@apache.org. We would like to thank Mark Cox from the security team for his help managing this issue.

Lokahi

The Lokahi project is still setting up its infrastructure: Subversion has been set up with proper commit privileges, and the initial code import just took place a couple of days ago. The Lokahi name has been cleared as far as trademark usage goes.

Lucene4c

There has been no activity since the last report. At some point soon we will likely want to officially mark this project as dormant.

Lucene.Net

Lucene.Net has recently gotten into the swing of things. George Aroush has officially moved the project from Sourceforge to the ASF repository. A very active contributor from the Sourceforge project has been proposed and is pending the receipt of his CLA.

Ode

Ode is currently adding a new round of commiters to its developer base. The Software grants for both donations from Intalio and Sybase have arrived and both have been checked in.

The community is actively discussing development plans for the two code bases.

OFBiz

The OFBiz team continues to gather individual contributor license agreements (iCLAs) from people who have contributed to the project in the past: this effort is nearly complete, and we expect to import OFBiz code into the ASF Subversion repository soon. You can see the progress of getting iCLAs at http://ofbizwiki.go-integral.com/Wiki.jsp?page=OFBizDevelopers.

In addition, the OFBiz PPMC has been setup and all initial committers and mentors subscribed to it. OFBiz management discussions have been taking place on that list for a few weeks now.

In summary, things are progressing well. No major issues at this time.

Roller

Roller development has been proceeding at a steady pace. The mailing lists seem to be getting more active with new users cropping up all the time. IBM DeveloperWorks now uses Roller for their blogs, LinPro AS is working on a large number of installations and North Carolina State Unversity is support to go live with campus-wide student blogs powered by Roller before the end of this month.

A Roller 2.2 release candidate was created on the 2nd to last Thursday of March (per our release cycle), we've gone through 5 release candidates now and a vote was called today (April 18th) for release.

For Roller 2.3, Allen Gilliland has been doing some major refactoring work in the Roller backend. Dave Johnson has been working on smaller issues including support for both weblog entry summary and content. A 2.3 release candidate may be appearing on Thursday, since it's the 2nd to last.

Looking forward, a new development roadmap has been prepared that covers Roller 2.3, 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 releases. Dave's Roller talk was accepted at ApacheCon EU in June 2006.

Other issues: LGPL issues are still unresolved and holding up graduation.

ServiceMix

The ServiceMix project is progressing along. Below are the recent project highlights:

• Added Nabble forums as an alternative to ASF mailing lists
• Currently preparing the ServiceMix 3.0 M1 milestone release
  

Solr

The Solr team has been focusing on preparing its first release candidate out of the incubator, and is getting fairly close: maybe another couple of weeks before we vote. All committers and mentors are on the solr-dev mailing list, where discussion has been taking place. All ASF resources (Subversion, mailing list, etc.) seem to have been created and are functioning well. We have also been taking this time to re-think our distro contents, e.g. where to put examples, whether to package Tomcat for an out-of-the-box working webapp, etc: those discussions have been taking place on the solr-dev list, which is public, and everyone is welcome to join.

Synapse

The Synapse team continues to work towards an M2 release and graduation.

WebWork 2

The last quarter has seen the creation of the WebWork 2 podling and rapid progress. Our focus has been on migrating code, resources, developers, IP, and community over to the ASF.

• Code: we have imported the code into the Incubator SVN, and have renamed packages, taglib prefixes, and any other references to the old WebWork project over to the new Struts Action Framework 2 project, where the final location of the code will be.
  
• Resources: We've migrated the code to the Apache SVN, setup and migrated JIRA tickets to the new issues.apache.org server, and are in the process of migration wiki documentation.
  
• Developers: The core WebWork 2 developers have been given accounts and access to the podling, voted in through the proposal. We plan to vote the remaining committers in one-by-one through the Struts PMC, serving as the IPMC for the podling.
  
• IP: The OpenSymphony organization, who owns the copyright on the WebWork 2 project, has delivered a code grant allowing us to change the copyright. Additionally, we've removed most of the LGPL source code (usually in the form of Javascript libraries) and have developed an optional build that compiles integration code depending on LGPL jars, in accordance to the draft IP policy document.
  
• Community: The WebWork 2 developers have joined the Struts mailing lists and have been very active in participating with both development and user threads. They have been just as, if not more, active committing to the code repository as Struts committers, and when conflicts arise, they are very quick to come to a solution in a positive way. In addition, several Struts committers have joined OpenSymphony forums, chat rooms, and projects further strengthening the relationship.
  

We are definitely planning on exiting the Incubator this next quarter, possibly within weeks. We see a bright future for the Struts Action project, and hope to facilitate a new spirit of cooperation within the competitive landscape of Java web application frameworks.

WADI

The WADI podling has decided to retire and not complete incubation. This decision was made by the participants, supported by the sponsoring Geronimo PMC, and announced to the Incubator PMC. The project will continue at [WWW] http://wadi.codehaus.org/

Yoko

Yoko is currently adding a new round of commiters to its developer base. The Software grant for the donation from IONA arrived and the code base has been checked in. The codebase from the original Trifork donation has been moved from Geronimo to Yoko.

The community is actively discussing development plans for the two code bases. Look to see intense discussions at JavaOne and ApacheCon EU.