March 2007 Reports (see ReportingSchedule)
These reports are due to the Incubator PMC by 14 March 2007
Incubator PMC members, please add your handle on the iPMC Reviewers: line if you have taken the time and accept the report as presented. E.g. iPMC Reviewers: noel, wrowe.
DO NOT modify reviewed reports, please; add further Q & A after the crux of the original report. This makes it simpler to preserve accepted reports.
SUBMITTED
In addition to the individual projects, the Incubator is reviewing its policy on Maven repository artifacts. Currently, Incubator artifacts for Maven are required to be placed in a separate repository, the goal being to ensure that users are not "accidental tourists", but have agreed to use Incubator artifacts. Apparently, we're not quite getting what we want from this approach, due to how Maven works, so we're revisiting the requirement, and will likely drop the separate repository. Perhaps we can use artifact signing to address the matter in a future version of Maven. Likewise, there seems to be a consensus to move normally distributed (non-Maven) artifacts into the mirrored ASF repository, under dist/incubator/, with the path, the artifact names, and the disclaimer all clearly labelling the artifacts as being in the Incubator.
There appears to be some community tension in the Tuscany project, but the PMC consensus is that the Mentors are working on it, so we're going to let it work itself out for now.
Heraldry has had issues because of a vendor deciding that they didn't like having to open up to community development after all. Work is underway to reconstitute the project without them. The heraldry-dev@ archives document the events and process.
Tika, a Content Analysis Toolkit, was approved to start Incubation.
ADF Faces / Trinidad
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, yoavs, jim, noel
Apache Trinidad is a library of JavaServer Faces components, runnable with every JSF-compliant implementation.
The Trinidad community was working over the past three month on several topics, like getting Trinidad stable and continuing the work for a JSF 1.2 compliant component lib.
The mailing list traffic was normal:
- DEV: 115 (Dec 2006), 91 (Jan 2007), 219 (Feb 2007): , 27 (March 2007)
- USER: 233 (Dec 2006), 365 (Jan 2007), 197 (Feb 2007): , 29 (March 2007)
Portal support landed on the trunk, contributed by Scott O'Bryan. Support for much improved dialogs came from Danny Robinson, and is gestating on a branch. 50 user reported issues were resolved in this period. The quality of the JSF 1.2 branch continued to solidify.
One of the items we are most proud of is the fact that we released a 1.0.0-incubating version of our Maven2 plugins and began preparations to release the CORE of Trinidad, the JSF components (for JSF 1.1).
Future goals:
- working on the release of the Trinidad CORE (meaning the JSF components)
- working on the graduation checklist
iPMC questions / comments:
- jukka: Things to do before graduation?
answer: we are currently checking the check list and "missing things". Please see the dev list.
- yoavs: seems to me that mailing list traffic this month is drastically lower than previous months.
answer: in march: user and dev lists are on a *regular base*. Feb was much higher in DEV, that's right.
- jukka: The report was submitted early, so only part of the traffic this month is included in the stats
answer: as of today, user list (243) and dev list (148) (was 219 in Feb.)
ODE
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, yoavs, jim, noel
Apache ODE is an implementation of the BPEL4WS and WS-BPEL specifications for web services orchestration. ODE entered incubation in March 2006.
Our activity during these past 3 months:
- Finished the transition from Hibernate to OpenJPA. This is almost done now with most of our scenarios working perfectly. We have to thanks the OpenJPA guys for that!
- A lot of efforts on reliability and performance, plus a few additional features here and there, like improved JBI support (in addition to Axis2).
- The user mailing-list has definitely been picking up, with more and more interesting questions.
The focus for the coming trimester is going to be very strong on making an incubator release now that all our IP issues have been cleared. It should really help us on our way out of the incubator through to golden door of success! The pending issues are:
- Making an incubator release, which should be able to complete this trimester finally (and should help us for the next point).
- Attracting more committers to encourage diversity.
iPMC questions / comments:
- jukka: Sounds good!
OpenEJB
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, yoavs, jim, noel
OpenEJB is an open source, modular, configurable, and extendable EJB Container System and EJB Server.
Incubating since: 2006-07-10
We received some very excellent feedback we are all really proud of from a new face in the community. OpenEJB has always prided itself for being the kinder, gentler side of open source and it's really good to know this is coming through.
Recent New Contributors: Karan Malhi and Raj Saini contributed their first patches.
New Committers: Manu George was voted in as an OpenEJB committer.
Mohammad Nour (voted in last reporting cycle) finally got his iCLA approved and will be getting his well-earned commit.
Work on an OpenEJB Eclipse plugin was launched and is generated lot's of excitement in the community.
iPMC questions / comments:
- jukka: Things to do before graduation?
This is the OpenJPA status report for the board for the three month
period ending Mar 2007.
OpenJPA
PMC review: noel
OpenJPA made good progress this quarter in all areas. The project has
many active committers all driving toward improving functionality,
stability, performance, and usability.
OpenJPA has met all of the technical requirements for graduation from
incubation, and is now waiting for the community to feel ready. It is
not clear whether the destination should be a TLP or a sub-project of
another. This discussion has not been started yet. Well, I guess it
just has.
Development
Development continues on the 0.9.7 release, which will contain many
bug fixes and performance improvements. Kevin Sutter has been
volunteered to cut the release once we decide there is enough done on
the list.
The JSR 220 TCK was passed.
JIRA now contains numerous proposed bug fixes and feature
enhancements, tentatively assigned to release buckets.
Infrastructure
The project is running smoothly with all systems green.
Community
One new committer was added (Michael Dick).
Three new PPMC members were added (Kevin Sutter, Marc Prud'hommeaux,
and Abe White).
Qpid
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, yoavs, jim, noel
The Apache Qpid Project provides an open and interoperable, multiple language implementations of the Advanced Messaged Queuing Protocol (AMQP) specification
Date of entry to the Incubator : 2006-09
Resolved issues
- We have defined our policy for adding new commiters (3 new committers voted in, 3 currently being voted on)
- It should be noted that no issues working with the AMQP working group have been identified yet
Top two items to resolve before graduation
- Understanding the details between JCP and announce compliance
- Making sure we are comfortable with the working relationship between Qpid and the AMQP Working Group.
Our STATUS file has been updated wrt to reports and the addition of our new committers. (should be published by the time this is read)
- Any legal, cross-project or personal issues that still need to be addressed?
The whole project has not gone through release review and the license files and notices need to be checked for items not in M1. All areas will be done for M2.
- Latest developments.
- Since entering into incubation we have had one release of the java code base (M1).
- We have migrated our build system from ant to maven.
- Development has been moving forward. with improvements in memory footprint management, passing the JMS TCK in with the java broker.
- Addition of .NET client
- Contributions from new non committers
- Successfully voted to give 3 new committers access rights
- Successfully voted to give a new member contributor rights to cwiki.
- The creation of Web site
- General progress on all code bases
- In progress voting on 3 more new committers
- Definition of test suite
- Plans and expectations for the next period?
- During the next period we plan on improving the stability of all language variants.
- Release a M2 of the full project
- Merge in branches relating to next spec version
- Move trunk to 0-10 of AMQP specification
- Imporoving tests and coverage
iPMC questions / comments:
River
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, yoavs, jim, noel
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.
- Apache River incubator project proposal approved on Dec 26, 2006
- Basic project structures created (mailing lists, web pages, jira, wiki, etc)
- Much and varied discussions on direction and particulars on the river-dev list
- ServiceUI contribution submitted and waiting PPMC formation and vote.
- Next steps include:
- complete requirements and setup of initial committer list and PPMC
- hold PPMC vote to accept ServiceUI contribution
- Sun to submit Starter Kit contribution
- hold PPMC vote to accept contribution
- finalize jira categories and migrate pre-existing Sun bug reports
- come to agreement on initial set of work leading to first Apache River release
iPMC questions / comments:
- jukka: It's taking some time for the initial codebases to be submitted. Any blockers in the process?
TripleSoup
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, yoavs, jim, noel
TripleSoup will be an RDF store, tooling to work with that database, and a REST web interface to talk to that database using SPARQL, implemented as an apache webserver module.
There are currently no issues requiring Incubator PMC or board attention.
- project just got started
- all basic infrastructure (SVN, basic website, status pages, mailing lists, etc) set up
- two committer accounts created (one account pending a CLA which is pending legal bits)
- IP clearance processes started
- one initial codebase imported
- legal process still underway for the two other initial codebases
- not that much SVN or mailing list activity yet
- not worried about this, we're pretty much waiting for codebases to arrive
iPMC questions / comments:
Wicket
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, yoavs, jim, noel
Web development framework focusing on pure OO coding, making the creation of new components very easy. Wicket entered the incubator in October 2006.
Top three items to resolve
- Release Apache Wicket 1.3-beta1-incubating
- Make the 2.0 code base license policy compliant (i.e. remove LGPL datepicker)
- Graduate
Community aspects:
- Community is very active and participating on @dev
- Voted Alistair Maw in as committer
- Voted Jean Baptiste Quenot (Cocoon developer) in as committer
- A Wicket tutorial will be given at apachecon europe.
Code aspects:
Preparations to release Wicket 1.3-beta1-incubating have been started, releases are being checked with RAT. Work continues steadily on 2.0
Licensing:
- Removed LGPL date picker component from extensions (1.3 branch, 2.0 still todo)
- Acquired CLA's for component/code contributions for 3 persons.
- Replacement of License headers in source files complete, created a unit test that checks this for all projects.
Infrastructure:
The website is generated using Confluence autoexport, and available on
http://incubator.apache.org/wicket Atlassian bamboo is running builds for Wicket at a private server, has raised interest with other projects.
iPMC questions / comments:
Woden
iPMC Reviewers: jukka, yoavs, jim, noel
Woden is a Java class library for reading, validating, manipulating, creating and writing WSDL documents, initially to support WSDL 2.0 and with the longer term aim of supporting past, present and future versions of WSDL.
We are trying to track down / re-do the paperwork (Software Grant) for donation of WSDL4J from IBM. WSDL4J is an SF.NET project under CPL 1.0 for the original WSDL 1.1 spec. Some of the code in woden was borrowed by the developers which is natural since woden implements WSDL 2.0 spec.
iPMC questions / comments:
- jukka: Things to do before graduation?
[DIMS]: A few more committers would always help
- yoavs: how long has Woden been incubation? How's the community doing: any new committers, contributors, or PPMC members? When's a release going to happen?
[DIMS] Please remember they are expecting to join WS PMC. So they are already part of the larger eco system and constantly get feedback since we are working on codegen in Axis2 based on WSDL2.0 (supported by woden). They will most probably have to cut another milestone for use with Axis2 (soon!)