May 2007 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule)

These reports are due to the Incubator PMC by 9 May 2007

Please remember to detail Issues To Resolve before Graduation, actiivty, status of community and status of code/releases.

Abdera

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

Abdera is an implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol and Atom Syndication Format.

Incubating since: 2006-06-05

Abdera has continued work on version 0.3.0, and is waiting for the Atom Publication Protocol to be completed by the Atom WG so that we can finalize support for it.

Additionally, there was some discussion of the best way to handle vendor specific extensions in Abdera. The consensus seems to be that there was no objection to having them as long as the extension was clearly defined in a public spec that was available under reasonable licensing terms.

We continue to see questions from new community members, which indicates that the code is being used, and when possible we've been trying to encourage them to contribute back to the project. Hopefully that will result in some new committers in the reasonably near future.

Lokahi

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

Lokahi is a configuration and management console for Apache httpd, tomcat and other web server infrastructure.

Incubating since: 2006-01-07

Several members of the Lokahi community attended Apachecon EU in an effort to grow the community. A FastFeather track on what Lokahi does and what it currently supports (slides are available here:http://people.apache.org/~toback/presentations/Lokahi-fast-feather-05-04-2007.pdf ). Specific outreach was made to the Geronimo community to help us get a sense of what it would take to have Lokahi control the Geronimo stack. A significant number of committers from other projects have subscribed to lokahi-dev over ApacheCon after discovering how this project could solve their own infrastructure headaches or how it could be enhanced to support their project's configuration and management. An initial roadmap of features has been planned, and development will be moving in the direction of the new roadmap. An initial draft of Lokahi's data model for the proposed switch to a Jackrabbit back-end was worked out with input from Jackrabbit community.

The conversion to JCR takes first priority because it will mitigate existing difficulties that hinder community-growing, namely:

(a) Oracle as db requirement, which reduces the potential user "market"; (b) inability to run Lokahi on a standalone machine, due to (a); (c) complicated build process, partially due to (a);

JCR will provide the following benefits:
(a) database independence (run Lokahi with a file system backend to try it out, or use a more robust storage platform for production) + embedded Derby db (b) lower barrier to contribution, see (a) (c) versioned objects – the basis for storing versioned configuration files & foundation for a future "undo" feature requested by users. Great for real-world use in regulated environments which require detailed audit trails of who-changed-what-and-when.

Obstacles to graduation:

  • community - now includes authors outside of the original dev community, but additional committers are sought. Recent distractions reinforced the fact that a larger committer base is needed to graduate.
  • licensing - oracle-only backend is now 90% of the way to an alternate MySQL backend, and soon to be enhanced with license agnostic interfaces

NMaven

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

NMaven develops plugins and integration for Maven to make building and using .NET languages a first-class citizen in Maven.

Incubating since: 2006-11-17

Items to resolve before graduation

  • More active committer involvement. This involves getting a group of developers familiar with the NMaven internals (both .NET and Java), as well as growing a larger community of developers who are creating Maven plugins in .NET.
  • Engage other ASF projects (Lucene.NET, log4net) to see if NMaven can meet any of their needs
  • Need a fair amount of work in getting the features in place so that we can automate releases of the .NET assemblies and projects. Getting on a regular schedule of releases, should help grow the community.

Status:

  • Active involvement from the community has been a little slow; but has picked up recently, as seen by the recent increase of discussions on the mailing list and community interest in submitting patches for features.
  • Published 6-month Road Map on Wiki
  • The latest features of writing Maven plugins directly in .NET and of IDE integration between Maven and Visual Studio are both targeted directly toward .NET developers. These features are expected to increase developer interest from the .NET community, particularly among those who may not have had previous experience with Java or Maven.
  • Fast feather talk on NMaven at ApacheCon in effort to increase community interest in project

Plans:

  • Work on getting the site documentation up-to-date with the latest features
  • Work on improving IDE features
  • Preparing for a release

RCF

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

RCF is a rich component set for JSF. Incubation has started a couple of weeks ago. The SVN, mailing lists and JIRA need to be set up. We are now waiting for an import of a current code drop into the repository.

Incubating since: May 2007

ServiceMix

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

ServiceMix is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) built on Java Business Integration (JBI, aka JSR 208). The project has been in incubation since 18.11.2005.

Since the last board report, three new committers have been voted in (Alex Boisvert, Thomas Termin and Gert Vanthienen), which brings the total number of committers to 30.

The team started the process to release a bug fix version of ServiceMix (3.1.1). In the meanwhile, development efforts continue towards a new major release, with new features, version updates of core libraries (ActiveMQ, XBean, Geronimo, ...) and improved ease of development for the end users (Maven Archetypes). Also, additional quality assurance tools are being integrated into the project build cycle to improve the existing codebase.

Since there appear to be no more outstanding issues for graduation, the discussion about this has recently started on the mailing lists. The majority of the community agrees that a top-level project would be more suitable, considering the size of the project and the community supporting it.

iPMC Comments:

  • jukka: +1 to graduation plans

stdcxx

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

Stdcxx status report for the calendar quarter ending in May 2007.

Project Summary:

Stdcxx is a highly portable implementation of the C++ Standard
Library conforming to the ISO/IEC 14882 international standard for
C++.

In incubation: since 5/19/2005.

Issues to resolve before graduation:

Increase committer base and diversity.

Community:

The project has 11 committers (excluding mentors). Not counting
mentors, the stdcxx IPMC consists of 9 committers.

Mailing List Activity:

Bug Tracking:

Current Projects:

Over the last three months the team has been working on porting
the project to a number of new operating systems and compilers. A
documentation project focused on updating and imrpoving the look
and feel of both the
Class Reference
and User's Guide
is currently under way. Site visitation activitiy is being tracked
with Google Analytics. The immediate number one goal is to
release the next version of the library in the summer of 2007.

Code:

The most recent release of stdcxx, version 4.1.3, was published in
January 2006. The next release, tentatively numbered 4.2, is
expected to be published in summer of 2007. All code is licensed
under the Apache license version 2.

iPMC Comments:

  • jukka: I'm qurious about http://incubator.apache.org/stdcxx/#committers. Why some people are following CTR and others RTC? Also, the comment "committers in italics do not have a signed Contributor License Agreement on file" doesn't make sense. You can't be a committer without a CLA on file.

Tika

iPMC Reviewers: jim

Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries.

Incubating since: March 22nd, 2007.

Community

We had a good project bootstrap meeting as a part of the text analysis BOF at the ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam. The resulting ideas were summarized on the project mailing list, and the first design threads have started.

Development

We've started discussing the design of the Tika toolkit. It seems like we will select one of the existing codebases listed in the project proposal as the basis of an early 0.1 release, and start refactoring the code into a more generic toolkit. The Tika svn tree is still empty, but I expect us to see the first code commits before the next report.

Infrastructure

All the initial infrastructure is now in place. There is still some activity on the temporary Tika wiki on the Google Project hosting service, so we may end up requesting a Tika wiki to be set up on the ASF infrastructure.

Issues before graduation

The Tika project is still at an early stage of incubation. The most important tasks before graduation are to develop and release the Tika codebase and to grow a diverse and sustainable project community.

TSIK

iPMC Reviewers:

TSIK is ...

Incubating since:

iPMC Comments:

  • jukka: report missing

Tuscany

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

Tuscany provides infrastructure for developing service-oriented applications based on Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification and Service Data Objects (SDO) specifications. These specifications were submitted to OASIS in March 2007 by OSOA (www.osoa.org)

Incubating since: 2006-11-30

Top issue? Need to get back on track with agreed project goals, provide a stable codebase/SPIs, and follow up with regular releases. This should create an environment that will attract a growing and diverse community of users and developers. We are working towards this.

Community aspects:

  • Voted in Adriano Crestani, an individual contributor, as a committer for his contributions to DAS project.
  • Voted in Andy Grove from RogueWave as a committer for his lengthy list of contributions to the SDO project.
  • Have been receiving many good user questions and have received good feedback on quality of responses that were provided.
  • Enhanced Tuscany website to improve information sharing. We are working on user and architecture guides for contributors or users of Tuscany.
  • Integration with Apache projects
    o Working with Apache Directory to provide DAS LDAP.
    o Integrated with BSF and Axis2.
  • Fractal is working on integration with Tuscany SCA Java
  • 3 of the commmitters (Jeremy Boynes, Jim Marino and Meeraj)chose to start a new open source project called Fabric3 in March 2007.

Code:

  • Released M3 incubator release of Native SCA and SDO C++ in early May.
  • Formed Community Test Suite for SDO which has been receiving many contributions, over 300 tests.
  • In the process of releasing Java SDO Beta1 incubator release. It has community approval and is going through IPMC approval.
  • In the process of releasing SCA Java. This release is focused on improved usability, stability (stable SPIs) and modularity. Stable and simple SPIs and modularity enhance extensibility of SCA for integration with other open source projects.

Note: OSOA is a collaboration group where the first version of SCA and SDO spec were developed, see: http://www.osoa.org

Woden

iPMC Reviewers: jukka

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.

Incubating since: 2005

In April, we released Milestone 7a to support the Axis2 1.2 release. This was a minor update to M7 released in February.

The M8 release is now under development. This will add full support for WSDL2 assertions (the non-schema validation rules) and will improve Woden's WSDL extensions API. M8 will likely be ready around late June / early July, around the time the spec could be moving to a full W3C Recommendation. With M8, the project should achieve it's first primary goal which was to support the W3C WSDL2 working group's efforts by providing a compliant implementation of the spec.

Post-M8 goals are to exit incubation and to review and stabilize the API so that we can ship a 1.0 release. Other functional requirements include WSDL serialization and support for WSDL 1.1.

The team has been addressing the following issues regarding exiting incubation:

  • building our public key presence on the Apache web of trust
  • adding developer documentation to the web site (to do)
  • attempting to grow the developer community (3 potential contributors unrelated to existing committers. 2 have submitted code already. The 3rd was a Google Summer of Code prospect whose GSoC proposal (Woden serialization) was rejected, but he's still keen to contribute this function.)

WSRP4J

iPMC Reviewers: jukka

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.

Incubating since: 2003

The project is very silent, there are nearly no user questions and nearly zero developer activity. Although there seems to be a medium to high interest in wsrp over the past years, no community could be built around wsrp4j. There is still an open patent issue. The portals PMC is aware of these problems and will address them asap.

iPMC Comments:

  • jukka: Good that someone is looking into this.

XAP

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

XAP is an XML-based Ajax application framework that supports application development via declaritive XML pages backed by Javascript event handlers.

Incubating since: Summer 2006

Code/Release Status:
*The first release was performed shortly after the last board report.

Recent Actvity:
*Dojo widget libray upgraded to 0.4
*Changed the way certain layout managers function to work better together and cover more cases.
*Various window behavior improvements and bug fixes, better styling of titlebar, icons, etc.
*Better support for imbedding HTML in XML and vice-versa.
*Various misc. widget improvments - more control over table styling, support for low-level mouse events (mouse move, mouse over, etc), cursor support, background image support, etc.

To Resolve Before Graduation:
*More diverse community.
*More community discussion on various development issues.
*More complex use cases / sample applications

Community Issues:
*Recently voted to add 2 new committers. (Vote results not yet tallied)

Yoko

iPMC Reviewers:

Yoko is ...

Incubating since:

iPMC Comments:

  • jukka: report missing
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