March 2009 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).

These reports were due here by Wednesday, 11 March 2009 so that the Incubator PMC can relay them to the board.

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
  

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.

Recent Activity:
The winter vacation has just finished for several weeks. Recently, we are preparing some document files like components installation guide and external lib declaration as Bill had told us. Most of the work would be done in several days. We've started to compare api of FFmpeg and vobis、theora. The running demo of Bluesky is under process too.

Next step:
*Waiting for the second code view by our mentor Bill.
*Ideally, we will begin to replace code of FFmpeg by vobis and theora.

Cassandra

Click

Click is a page and component oriented Java web framework.

Click has been incubating since July 2008.

Tasks completed since December:

• Replaced all incompatible licensed libraries
• Click 2.0.1 was released from the Apache Incubator
• New JIRA was created and issues imported from old version
  

Top priorities:

• Review the current diversity in the developer community
  

Empire-db

This is an out of schedule board report, that the Incubator PMC asked us to provide due to the following incident:

The situation

A committer “C” of Empire-db had the idea to create and provide an example application that demonstrates how to use Apache Empire-db together with Apache CXF. Initially he intended to write the code himself, but then he found himself too busy and never really got around doing it. So he decided to ask a student S instead to write the code for him using his templates and ideas. S then wrote the code with a little aid of C and he got paid for it. The work contract S had with C said that all rights over the code would exclusively belong to C.

When the coding was finished, C asked S to submit the code using his Apache SVN account. For that C temporarily logged S in from within Eclipse to SVN on one of C’s computers (Please note: the login was performed by C the password itself was not given to S). C then also asked S subscribe and write to the Empire-db-dev mailing list to resolve problems he had with the Maven project layout. C believed that all actions taken were legitimate and in the best interest of the project and the ASF.

The issues

When a Mentor of the Empire-db project became aware of this transaction, he raised strong concerns regarding the following two issues:

1. Legal concerns that an ICLA from S would be required for the code that was contributed. 2. Security concerns, whether access to the SVN could have been abused by S or the password for the SVN account for C could have been revealed by S.

Furthermore he pointed out, that sharing an account - even temporarily - is not approved by the community and hence must under no circumstances be repeated.

These concerns were also forwarded to the Incubator private mailing list, where the actions taken by C also upset many people. There was a clear verdict, that the mentor’s concerns and disapproval were shared by everyone else.

C was surprised by the reaction of the Incubator PMC and defended himself with the following arguments:

1. Since C is the exclusive legal owner of all rights over the code that was submitted, only he could contribute it to the ASF anyway. Hence an ICLA for S is from a legal point of view not required, even though he might be the originator. 2. It is very unlikely and there is absolutely no reason to believe that the account has been abused or compromised by S in any way, since the login was only valid for the actual Eclipse session. For people of the same company, working in the same LAN, there might be technically easier ways of compromising an account. Even so he takes full responsibility for everything that is or was done under his account.
   

C posted his statements on the Empire-db private mailing list and it is unclear whether all people interested in this subject had the opportunity to read these arguments.

The respondents were not all convinced by these arguments and the legal issue still has not been fully resolved. However, still there is a strong common agreement on the disapproval of account sharing.

The resolve

C acknowledges and respects the opinion of the community. As far as the sharing of this account is concerned, he publicly assures not to repeat it with any of this Apache accounts.

In order to resolve any remaining concerns the following actions were taken by C and S as requested from the Incubator board:

1. S has signed and submitted an ICLA to the ASF. 2. C has changed this SVN password
   

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.

Community:

• Additional community members have submitted their iCLA with the aim of becoming more involved
• Siemens press release about ESME, reviewed by the Apache PRC and published at http://url.ie/1bjo
  

Development:

• Somewhat reduced activity last month, and questioning as to why this is happening.
• Good progress on the Twitter API, implementation nearly finished.
  

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.

We've prepared a bug fix release (1.0.2) which has been submitted for an incubator vote. The 1.0.2 release also includes updated licensing information in compliance with Apache standards. A 1.1 release with proper package and namespace changes is being prepared as well. The 1.1 release will also include experimental code for a c and python binding.

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. While we will continue for awhile to host this build at Cisco, we need to find a more neutral and open place to 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 a bit more forgiving.

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 constructed interfaces of matrix and vector.
• We implemented sparse/dense matrix-matrix multiplication and dot products.
• We implemented shell and user can use shell to manage matrices.
• We start implementation of the sparse matrix and sparse graph which is a graph with sparse matrix.
  

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:

• The corporate CCLA has been received by ASF.
• Initial code contribution has been contributed.
  

The following is planned for next reporting period:

• Contributed code to be built.
• API Java doc to be built and put onto website.
• Development of reference implementation (RI) of Kato API.
• Development of working TCK.
  

Log4php

OpenWebBeans

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 last report

• We have got a new committer who is Mark Struberg.
• We released the M1 version
• We published our new site via Maven
  

Belows are the next steps for coming days;

• We will release the M2 version.
• We will create additional documentation in the project web site.
• We will implement additional examples that show the usage of the OpenWebBeans
• We will continue to attract new committers into the project.
  

Pivot

Pivot is an open-source platform for building rich internet applications in Java.

Pivot was accepted into incubation on the 26 January 2009.

The Pivot community missed the last report, largely due to after acceptance a period of 'no action' ensued. The Pivot project has now taken off. One initial committer is lost in action and has been removed from the initial committer list, as well as the couple of patches that he supplied has been reverted. The remaining 4 committers have submitted CLAs, accounts has been created, authorization setup, Jira has been created, Confluence space has been created, and we are soon to do the initial codebase submission. All activities of setting up the podling has been tracked in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PIVOT-1

RAT

After a long quiet period, there seems to have been a definite change of momentum. A major stumbling block has been the absence of released version of the codebase after the move to Apache. Once this has happened, it should be possible to start on some more interesting topics.

Preparation of a 0.6 release ongoing (and looking good). Hopefully due in April.

The scan code that generates http://incubator.apache.org/audit/ (by auditing the distribution directories) is probably just about good enough for wider distribution and use by other projects at Apache. This will be targeted for release before May.

Discussions are ongoing about a Google SoC originating in Harmony but more naturally in scope at RAT

Top Issues Before Graduation:

1. ATM RAT is too small for a TLP but not clearly in scope for any existing TLPs 2. Regain momentum
   

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.

The River project is not doing well. Practically all original committers are inactive and while there are interested users and even some pretty active discussions about the future of River, that interest isn't showing up as patches or other more constructive contributions.

We've seen some effort towards making the QA test suite more accessible, and there is interest in doing another release. However, nobody is actively working on new features or bigger improvements. It has been suggested that River needs a major new vision, but it's debatable whether that would do better as a fresh new project. In any case nobody is actively pushing for anything like that.

There is still hope for River, but at this rate the project is heading for termination.

Issues before graduation:

• Re-activate the development community
• Migrate packages to org.apache.river
• Another Apache release
  

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:

• 3 new committers joined the project
• on track to publish a stable release compliant to OpenSocial v0.8.1 (scheduled for next quarter)
• working to make Shindig compliant to OpenSocial v0.9
  

Stonehenge

Stonehenge was accepted in December 2008

Stonehenge continues to make progress. There is now code committed for Ruby, PHP, Axis2/Java and .NET. We are working on the wiki documentation on how to get started and run the samples. Sun are working on an implementation for Metro and we hope to get some contribution from Apache CXF too. Discussion and mailing lists are slowly getting into place and the SVN and JIRA are all in place and being used.

Main Activities:

• .NET Stock Trader code contributed
• Java and PHP Stock Trader code contributed
• New tree structure for all contributions created
• All existing code moved from contrib to trunk
• new committers from SUN Microsystems identified and came online
• Goals and exit criteria of Milestone 1 release being defined