June 2007 Jakarta Board Report
Status
Another 2 projects have left Jakarta to live on their own : POI and Turbine and both of almost (or completely) finished the move. I like to wish the projects the best and a very good and long lasting future. In a seperate mail there is a TLP proposal for commons, which on acceptance will mean that the biggest part of the Jakarta community have no direct ties anymore with Jakarta. The focus after commons will be on the projects left at Jakarta and see if there is possibility for them to go TLP or when that is not viable or possible, find a suitable solution for those projects. My explicit wish is that there will be no deadline for projects to move so there will be enough time to find the best solution, instead of the quickest solution. We owe that to all the people in those projects who invest a lot of time and energy in those projects. One of the big discussions that took place was about the future of Jakarta and the thing we in majority agreed on (at least the people who spoke up) is that it is worth to "save" the Jakarta brand. Since I prefer to spend the energy and time I have in the projects that are left at Jakarta, I decided not to invest time on what will happen to the Jakarta brand at this time, simply because they deserve my time and energy and out of respect for the projects that still currently have their existance at Jakarta. If the board decides to not esablish the commons TLP, we need to go back to the drawing table.
All in all : a lot is happening and a lot is going to happen in the months to come. If there is reason to do so, I will provide extra board reports besides the quarterly schedule.
Reports prefixed with MvdB are written by me.
Releases
- 30 March 2007 - HttpComponents HttpCore 4.0 alpha 4 released
- 4 April 2007 - Commons DBCP 1.2.2
- 8 April 2007 - Commons Configuration 1.4
- 16 April 2007 - BSF 3.0-beta1
- 18 May 2007 - POI 3.0 Final released
- 6 June 2007 - JCS 1.3 released
Community changes
New committers, pmc persons, asf members and departures.
- New Committers
- Ben Speakmon was voted in as a Commons Committer
- Alf Hogemark was voted in as a JMeter Committer
- Asankha C. Perera was voted in as a HttpComponents Committer
- M. Johnson (although not new, his account was created just now,
because of CLA problems). (POI)
- PMC Members
- Thomas Vandahl was voted on to the PMC
- Danny Angus was persuaded to come back on the PMC.
- Ant Elder was voted on the PMC.
Fixed the bookkeeping on the addition of Nick Burch to the Jakarta PMC (that was reported in the December 2006 report.
Infrastructure news
The only things currently happening is the move of infrastructure for the Turbine and POI TLP projects.
General project news
The Jakarta PMC has started to review all Jakarta projects whether they contain or rely on cryptographic software and if they must be marked as described on http://apache.org/dev/crypto. This is an ongoing process and we expect some corner cases where we will need legal advice.
Subproject news
BCEL
No activity.
BSF
MvdB : A talk for Apachecon US was accepted (Rony Flatcher), which will hopefully increase the user base (observation : since the user list is also pretty quiet it can mean that BSF is bug free or it needs more users) Sorry, oversaw that the release of beta 1 of BSF 3.0 fell into the second quarter (ant was able to report the result of the vote on 2007-04-16) and should have been reported as such by us! This is the version that brings JSR-223 (a.k.a. "Java 6 scripting framework") to the Apache table: it allows de/employing the Java scripting framework starting with Java 1.4 (the Sun implementation is only available starting with Java 1.6/6, foregoing the entire pre-Java-6 installed base). ant has been trying to get word on receiving the appropriate Sun TCK from Geir, but so far no news can be reported here....
Cactus
MvdB:
The ip clearance finally passed, so Petar is now able to (re)integrate his code into the cactus codebase.
Commons
A commons TLP resolution was sent to the Board at the same time of this board report.
31 March 2007 - vote passed to promote the JCI (Java Compiler Interface) to a proper component (from the Sandbox).
Attributes
BeanUtils
Betwixt
Chain
- Ready for a 1.2 bugfix release.
CLI
- Gearing up for a 1.1 release.
Codec
Collections
Configuration
- 8 April 2007 - Configuration 1.4 released
Daemon
DBCP
- 1 April 2007 DBCP 1.2.2 released
DbUtils
Digester
Discovery
EL
FileUpload
IO
- Gearing up for a 1.3.2 bugfix release.
JCI
- Gearing up for a first 1.0 release.
Jelly
Jexl
JXPath
- Gearing up for a 1.3 release.
Lang
Launcher
Logging
- Needs someone to do a 1.1.1 bugfix release.
Math
- Gearing up for a 1.2 release.
Modeler
Net
Pool
Primitives
SCXML
- Working towards a 0.7 release.
Transaction
Validator
VFS
Dormant
Sandbox
ECS
Nothing happened on the ECS front.
HttpComponents
Work on the first alpha of HttpClient 4.0 has made good progress. We expect to release client-alpha1 and the matching core-alpha5 shortly.
There is currently no release manager for a potential HttpClient 3.1 final release. Since the RC1 was released only in March, this is not an immediate problem. Bug reports are still dripping in, and bugs keep getting fixed. But we'll need to find a volunteer eventually.
Various options to spin off HttpComponents from Jakarta are being discussed. This could improve the focus of the active members of the HttpComponents (sub-)community.
JCS
JCS 1.3 has been released. Thomas Vandahl acted as the release manager.
JMeter
Very active (as always) and gained a new committer recently.
ORO
Mature and therefor no activity needed.
POI
Released 3.0 Final.
Following a vote and board approved, became a TLP. Please see the POI board report for more information on the move.
Regexp
Mature and therefor no activity needed.
Slide
MvdB (since I am considering myself Slide committer, this report is done from that "position") Codebase wise not much happening at this stage. Searching for future options for Slide outside of Jakarta and one of the options is to merge the Slide and HttpComponents communities. Setting up a proposal for the community to discuss and vote on will soon follow. Goal is to not split up the Slide server and client codebase and have the client build on top of the new HttpComponents version. We suffer from lack of cycles to spare (meaning the committers).
Taglibs
The possibility of consolidating all of the existing taglibs such that we end up with three active taglib release units (Standard, RDC, "unstandard"
– name TBD) was discussed, and there seems agreement (amongst the 5 developers who expressed any opinion) that this is a reasonable way to proceed.
Turbine
Turbine is in the process of going Top-Level. Site and mailing lists are already in place. SVN and other stuff still needs to be moved. For the latest update on Turbin I refer to the Turbine board report.