June 2009 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).

These reports were due here by Wednesday, 10 June 2009 so that the Incubator PMC could relay them to the board.

(June 11th - just wrote a reminder to some projects, indicating that reporting early next week should be ok, the board meeting is on the 24th - Bertrand)

(And later found out that the board meeting is on the 17th instead, so reports are due Real Soon Now

THIS PAGE IS 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:

The "incubating since" info
The project's top 2 or 3 things to resolve prior to graduation
A short description of what your project's software does

Ace

Apache ACE is a software distribution framework that allows you to centrally manage and distribute software components, configuration data and other artifacts to target systems. ACE started incubation on April 24th 2009.

There are currently no issues requiring board or Incubator PMC attention.

Community:

The infrastructure is all in place, community is ready and waiting for the IP clearance process to be completed.
Several people already looked at the donated codebase, and Toni Menzel even has a couple of patches ready.
A logo was designed for the project, which is used in the wiki currently.

Software:

Initial codebase and documentation have been donated.
Software grant was mailed twice without success, now faxed it, just got notified that it is on record now.

Licensing and other issues:

None at the moment, no code has been committed yet.

Bluesky

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.

Finally we committed our source code, though part of the source code, to SVN repository. Now the most urgent things for us is to replace FFmpeg with Theora and Vorbis. We've started to learn Theora and Vorbis but not too much progress were gained. Another bad news is that we are now severely short of hands. Some students are gonna graduate in days. Thus we have to enroll some undergraduate students to our lab. We've already got one and he is now getting familiar with our system. I hope that his participation would help.

Next step:

*Continue to learn Theora and Vorbis, try to replace FFmpeg soon;

Cassandra

Cassandra is a distributed storage system providing reliability at a massive scale. Started incubation: 01/2009. Opened to community in 03/2009.

The original authors of Cassandra from facebook (Avinash and Prashant) have gone back to developing against an internal repository. We have never seen any involvement from initial committer Dan, either.

Despite this setback we continue to make progress; a 0.3.0 release is imminent and two more committers have been nominated, out of six who regularly submit patches. Cassandra was represented at the recent NoSQL distributed database summit by Avinash and Jonathan and was very well received.

Past action items:

Consensus about the development process. Done. Development is done in trunk with branches for releases. A pre-commit patch review process is followed that will be familiar to most apache committers.
JIRA permissions and configuration. Done.
A bit more information on the web site. Done.

Next steps:

Get new committers voted on
Get 0.3.0 release out

Chemistry

Apache Chemistry is an effort to provide a Java (and possibly others, like JavaScript) implementation of the upcoming CMIS specification. Chemistry entered incubation on April 30th, 2009.

The incubation process has started well. All the project infrastructure is in place and all initial committers have their Apache accounts. We even increased the headcount of the initial team as David Caruana joined the project as a new committer.

Development of the Chemistry codebase has moved to Apache svn and there's been a number or related discussions on the mailing list. Overall the project is still in a startup phase as people are getting oriented with the scope and structure of the project. A number of license headers were updated to match Apache policies.

Issues before graduation:

Stabilize the general interest into a sustainable development community
Make sure that all licensing details conform with Apache policies
Create an Apache release of the Chemistry codebase

Click

Click is a stateless page and component oriented Java web framework.

Click has been incubating since July 2008.

Tasks completed since March:

Released Click 1.5.2, a non-Apache maintenance release hosted at SourceForge
Graduation to TLP was postponed as the IPMC felt that more PPMC members are needed

Top priorities:

Grow the current developer community
Release Apache Click 2.1.0

ESME

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.

The following items have been performed since the last reporting period

Creation of initial draft of Apache Wiki
Dick Hirsch has successfully submitted his Apache CLA
Worked on cleaning up code with a focus on better separation of UI and server code
Creation of branch to deal with access pools prototype

The following items are planned for the next reporting period:

Finish work on Apache wiki and replace old forrest site
Merge access pool branch into trunk
Work on new UI

Top 2 or 3 things to resolve prior to graduation

Move all collaboration to the esme-dev mailing list
Increase community involvement in the project
Provide instructions for people to build, install and evaluate EMSE by themselves

Etch

Etch was accepted into Incubator on 2 September 2008.

Etch is a cross-platform, language- and transport-independent framework for building and consuming network services. The Etch toolset includes a network service description language, a compiler, and binding libraries for a variety of programming languages.

On April 16 we announced the availability of a bug fix release (1.0.2) The 1.0.2 release also includes updated licensing information in compliance with Apache standards. A 1.1 release is now being vetted and we hope to vote on it soon. The 1.1 release includes proper package names, bug fixes, enhancements, and also new code contributions in support of c and python bindings (not yet fully functional).

Our problem with finding a home for our continuous build continues. Various plans have been proposed and failed due to lack of a Windows-friendly c# build environment. Cisco is no longer hosting our build environment. We need to find a place do public builds.

Cisco folks continue to be the primary source of discussion and commits. There are some external nibbles, but none that are ready to pitch-in in a serious way yet. More work needs to be done on the web site to make steps to participation more evident. Work also needs to be done on the build environment to make it easier to get started. Some of the etch committers have left Cisco, more will soon follow.

Also in April, Manoj Ganesan (Dell) has been accepted by the incubator pmc to be our newest etch committer. Seth Call and JD Liau have withdrawn from the project.

I believe all of the outstanding items are done, but it isn't clear to me (scott) what the process is to check them off.

Outstanding items:

Check and make sure that the papers that transfer rights to the ASF been received...
Check and make sure that the files that have been donated have been updated to reflect the new ASF copyright...
Check and make sure that for all code included with the distribution that is not under the Apache license...
Check and make sure that all source code distributed by the project is covered by one or more of the following approved licenses...

Hama

Hama has been incubating since 19 May, 2008. It is a parallel matrix computational package based on Hadoop Map/Reduce.

Recent developments:

We implemented the matrix norm and transpose methods.

Required before graduation:

More practical examples of matrix manipulation
Increase community size and activity
First Apache release

Kato

Kato was accepted into the Incubator on 6 November 2008.

Kato is a project to develop the Specification, Reference Implementation, and TCK for JSR 326: the JVM Post-mortem Diagnostics API

Recent Activity:

We produced two implementations of the Apache Kato API - one based on Hprof and another on JVMTI using python.
A Developerworks article on Apache Kato and JSR-326 was published.
The API is being built and Javadoc is available on Hudson.
Builds are now being performed on the ASF's Hudson server
A presentation was given on the Apache Kato API. Recordings are available on the Wiki.
A BOF on Apache Kato and JSR-326 was held at Java One 2009 - BOF-4870.

The following is planned for next reporting period:

We will produce an Early Draft Review for the JSR in time to meet it's deadline.
We will build all of the project on the ASF's Hudson server.
We will have a viable reference implementation of the API and TCK.

Before this project can be graduated we need to produce a usable implementation of the API and more useful tools to encourage adoption and participation of a much needed community.

Log4php

Log4PHP is a logging framework similar to Log4J, but in PHP. The project entered incubation in 2004, retired and restarted again on 2007-07-04.

After some discussions beginning 2009 about lack of committer and community interest, several people showed up their interest in continuing this project. The following people joined the project:

2009-04-28 - New Committer: Christian Grobmeier
2009-04-28 - New Committer: Gavin McDonald
2009-04-28 - New Mentor: Niclas Hedhman
2009-04-28 - New Mentor: Gavin McDonald

Log4PHP now has a PPMC private list - log4php-private@incubator.apache.org. Current Mentors and existing committers have been emailed asking them to join this list.

Several code changes has been done in the following weeks:

Activity on porting log4php to PHP5
Increased the number of test cases
Cleaned up code and codestyle

Next steps:

Finishing php5 port
Cleaning up code
Updating documentation + Website
Try to attract more developers for Log4PHP
Bringing Continuus Integration to a Apache Host (currently hosted on private servers bei Knut Urdalen)
Looking at getting an incubating release done.

Issues before graduation:

Still less community interaction

OpenWebBeans

OpenWebBeans will be an ASL-licensed implementation of the Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE Specification which is defined as JSR-299.

OpenWebBeans entered the incubator in October 26, 2008. The following items have been made after the last report

We released the M2 version
We created additional documentation in the wiki page
We implemented full blown JSF + JPA + OWB application that shows usage of the OpenWebBeans
Gurkan Erdogdu replaces Matthias Wessendorf seat on the JSR-299 EG

Belows are the next steps;

We will release the M3 version.
We will create more documentation in the wiki
We will continue to attract new committers into the project.

There are some concerns related with the specification and its implementation,

JSR-299 specification has changed so much from the last draft. It has been having a negative impact on the implementation.
Last draft specification has a tight integration with Java EE's other specifications so that integration with an EJB, Servlet, Managed Beans etc. with the OWB is unavoidable. So, we have to work closely with other Apache Teams who have been implementing aferomentioned specifications to fully implement the JSR-299 and to pass TCK.

RAT

Rat was accepted into the incubator in November 2007

Rat audits releases.

Since the last report:

The first release here at Apache was cut (which drew assistance from lurkers)
The code has been simplified with the aim of making it more accessible to new developers

We hope to extend RAT to provide a central way of verifying the status of source code in Incubator projects (and eentually all ASF projects). The hope is that by making it more useful to the wonderful ASF committers we will see RAT becoming more functional.

The biggest problem that needs to be resolved before graduation is final destination.

To graduate as a top level project, significant numbers of new developers would need to be attracted. This would probably require significant energy to be devoted first into extending it's usefulness beyond Apache-like open source projects then raising it's profile.

Conversely, ATM there is no candidate top level project which could home Rat as a sub-project (suggestions welcomed).

River

River is aimed at the development and advancement of the Jini technology core infrastructure. Jini technology is a service oriented architecture that defines a programming model which both exploits and extends Java technology to enable the construction of secure, distributed systems which are adaptive to change. River has been incubating since December 2006.

Recently there has been increased activity in River's development process with the arrival of three new Committer's, Jonathan Costers, Peter Firmstone and Tom Hobbs.
AR2 is almost ready for release, and the committers are learning how to use the testing framework from Sun, and gradually move things to JUnit or more commonly understood testing systems.
For testing reasons, additional server resources might be requested for the jtreg and integration tests; An HTTP proxy (River-306) and KDC server (River-307) are necessary.
The decision was made to allow developers to use Java 5 new language features and change the com.sun.jini.* and com.artima.* namespaces to org.apache.river.* (River-261) after the release of AR2.
Efforts are being made for preservation of existing documentation, mail lists and River dependent projects that currently exist outside of River. Sun is closing Jini and RMI mailing lists, including the archives, which contains a wealth of information.
Consolidation of external Jini projects was discussed as optional add-ons, this discussion is still open, pending River incubation graduation.

Mentor's (Niclas) additional reporting; It is good to see new fresh blood getting active in the community and a more positive atmosphere is starting to emerge, and I think the worries in the previous report is decreasing.

Shindig

Shindig is a reference implementation of the OpenSocial and gadgets stack. The active community has built two parallel implementations of the OpenSocial and gadgets spec; one in Java and one in PHP.

Incubating since: 2007-12-06

High-level status summary during last quarter:

stable release compliant to OpenSocial v0.8.1 currently being reviewed by PMC
updates for OpenSocial v0.9 are implemented and in production on several sites that support OpenSocial
updated http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/ with a new layout and more resources
held a logo contest and adopted a new logo

SocialSite

Wink

WSRP4J

The WSRP4J Project is an implementation of WSRP 1.0 Producer. WSRP is an OASIS specification that describes a protocol which allows portlets to be accessed remotely using Web Services.

The WSRP4J Project has been adopted by the Portals PMC, while still in the Apache Incubator, with the intent to eventually graduate as a sub-project of Apache Portals.

However, there has been no changes nor real activity in the WSRP4J project for quite some time.

While the the interest for WSRP4J might seem to have dwindled, several active Apache Portals committers still belief there is a real potential to reactivate this project, especially in the light of the new WSRP 2.0 OASIS specification. As the only existing "open" standard in this area, interest for a formal release also has been expressed (privately) by several large organizations, including governmental.

Furthermore, even while there hasn't been a formal WSRP4J (incubator) release so far, in reality its codebase has been adapted and is in use by non ASF products and projects quite a lot.

But the primary reason why further development has been stalled is a legal one with regards to IPR. Two parties of the WSRP technical committee, IBM and WebCollage, have stated patent claims on the WSRP specification. See also: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsrp/ipr.php Concerning the claims from IBM we think those are not limiting us to produce an ASF compliant release of WSRP4J. But we are still not sure about the claims from WebCollage.

Last year, with the help from legal-internal, we have pursuit to resolve these uncertainties, and there has been preliminary contact with WebCollage, but this has stalled again. We still hope we can resolve this satisfactory, but we do seek further help and legal advise how to proceed.

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