Apache Newsletter

Issue: 1

Date: July 2003

Url: http://www.apache.org/newsletter/200307.html

Status: CLOSE

Editorial

I am glad that this "Apache Newsletter" [1] could be published as a result of the outgrowth of "Jakarta Newsletter" [2] and the newsletter can cover all the projects including infrastructure, incubator et cetera.

Who is writing this? .. well I am a Japanese fellow who has been engaged in the community build process for a long time in Japan. I have been translating some of the Apache Jakarta projects' websites into Japanese now [3] and last month I published the Jakarta newsletter issue 9 as a successor of the Rob Oxspring and Robert Burrell Donkin's great works. The newsletter was highly evaluated and now it has been outgrown to the first "The Apache Newsletter". My main job is marketing, business development and IT consulting [4].

Today, 15th August 2003, is the 58th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War (and World War II) and I am very glad to publish this newsletter in this moment. The internet and the wave of internationalization gradually reduced the boundaries of each countries, as well, this newsletter will be one of the *glue* of the communities in the ASF umbrella, beyond the artificial boundaries of technical languages etc. Hope this can gradually lead the good course of the ASF, avoiding the balkanization of each projects and keep the hand tightly with various projects.

I want to thank those who contributed and hope that you enjoy the read. If you would like to comment further on any of the highlighted discussions then please do so on the appropriate mailing lists [5], if you want to comment on the newsletter itself then please point your comments to ApacheWiki [6].

Issuer: The Apache Software Foundation -- 15th August, 2003

Editor: Tetsuya Kitahata (tetsuya at apache.org)

Table of Contents

The Apache Ant Project

Recent Apache Ant news are shown below:

This was a supplementary release made on April 16th. There was no functional change. from Ant 1.5.3 - it just removed a copy of junit.jar which had inadvertently been included in the Ant 1.5.3 build.   

This is scheduled for release in the next week. It addresses just two particular problems - the change to the javah entry point in the latest JDK release and the Visual Age tasks. The latter, being only compatible with JDK 1.1, were included to give users of this task a working release prior to the Ant 1.6 release which depends on JDK 1.2+

Ant 1.6 is the current development codebase (CVS head). There is no timeframe yet on this release.

A new committer Peter Reilly has been added to the project and is making valuable contributions to the operation of the Ant core.

As of August 8, Ant can build and run Mono code on Linux, using the <csc> task:-

testCSC-Mono:
{{{     ["csc"] compiling 2 files 
     ["csc"] WROTE SYMFILE: 2 sources, 2 methods, 3 types, 4 line numbers, 0 locals, 2 namespaces, 223 bytes of string data 
     ["csc"] OffsetTable [615 - 52:491 - 2:567:48 - 2:543:24 - 3] 
     ["csc"] Compilation succeeded 

    ["exec"] hello, I look like Java, but I'm really .NET

The Apache APR Project

We could not hear the July news from Apache APR Project [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

The Apache Avalon Project

The recently flurry of activity on the Avalon mailing lists has centered on defining the next generation of Avalon containers and preparing a subsequent roadmap. With the dust beginning to settle, the Merlin project is poised to be released and become the flagship Avalon container, supporting the Avalon 4 Framework and previous containers (Fortress and Phoenix).

Avalon Meta

In an effort to standardize the various meta-info schemes used in Avalon containers, the avalon-meta project was created in the sandbox repository. Originally developed under the Merlin container, the meta project will combine the AMTAGS (Avalon Meta Tags) proposal and the original Merlin meta model. Consideration has also been given to directly adopting the attrib4j project [1].

Avalon + .NET

Work on a C# implementation of the Avalon framework accelerated this last month. There has been more interest, a couple of additional potential developers, and work starting on .NET container. The goal is widest compatibility (i.e. will work with Mono and Microsoft .NET).

For more information about 'The Apache Avalon', please visit our website [2] and participate in our developments. Any inputs/comments/suggestions will be appreciated.

The Apache Cocoon Project

Apache Cocoon

Editor: Steven Noels

On July 30th, the Cocoon development team announced the release of the Cocoon 2.1 [1] release candidate, which is a major advancement of the successful 2.0 version. This 2.1 release affirms Cocoon's strengths for XML-pipelined multiple media publishing, but now also offers a set of truly compelling web application development strategies, including several maturing form and application flow handling frameworks, which are in the process of being unified for upcoming new versions of Cocoon. Also, Cocoon is gradually becoming a componentized server environment, offering the capability to only employ a restricted set of features depending on your needs. Cocoon 2.1 also includes a redesign of the very popular portal framework. It is to be expected that Cocoon 2.1 final will be released in middle of August. The Cocoon project also welcomed a set of new committers, all of them long-standing community members. Furthermore, the incubation of Cocoon's subproject Lenya [2], a Cocoon-based CMS application, is actively underway.

The yearly Cocoon { { { GetTogether } } }, a developer and user community event to be held on October 7th in Ghent, Belgium, has been announced on the Cocoon community lists, and will now be organized by Orixo [3], the XML business alliance set up by several Cocoon-involved companies. The event's website is located at 'event announcement page' [4].

Apache Lenya

Editor: Michael Wechner

The former Wyona Content Management System has been donated to the Apache Software Foundation and is currently being incubated as a Cocoon subproject [1]. The Lenya developers are currently refactoring, consolidating and enhancing the existing code base. The Lenya core is architectured as a framework, whereas the Lenya publications can be used as out of the box solutions. Release candidate 2 is expected to be ready by the end of September.

The Apache Commons Project

We could not hear the July news from Apache Commons Project [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

The Apache DB Project

Apache DB OJB

{ { { July saw the final release candidate of OJB 1.0 (OJB 1.0 R.C.4) which is heading toward the first FINAL Release of OJB 1.0.  } } } 

NEW FEATURES:

NOTES:

CHANGES:

BUG FIXES:

For more information, see the Apache OJB (Object Relational Bridge) website [1]. Hope to hear your feedbacks/inputs/comments/ to our developers' mailing list [2].

Apache DB Torque

Contributor: Daniel Rall, Tetsuya Kitahata

Recent news includes release of Torque 3.0.2 and 3.1 alpha 2. See the change log [1] for more details. Also, please visit our website [2] to see the significant change on our project. Hope to hear your feedbacks/inputs/comments/ to our developers' mailing list [3].

The Apache HTTP Server Project

July saw the two significant HTTP Server Release: Apache HTTP Server 2.0.47 at 9th July, 2003 and Apache HTTP Server 1.3.28 at 18th July, 2003.

HTTP Server 1.3.28 version of Apache is principally a bug and security fix release. A partial summary of the bug fixes is given at the end of the release note document. A full listing of changes can be found in the CHANGES file. Of particular note is that 1.3.28 addresses and fixes 3 potential security issues:

HTTP Server 2.0.47 version of Apache is principally a security and bug fix release. A summary of the bug fixes is given at the end of the release note. Of particular note is that 2.0.47 addresses four security vulnerabilities.

The website Apacheweek [1] is host to an active newsletter documenting the Apache HTTP Server Project, with some coverage of other Apache projects.

See The Apache HTTP Server Home Page [2] for more details.

The Apache Incubator Project

Incubator General

Editor: Tetsuya Kitahata

In July, we saw the proposal of XMLBeans project [1] by Cliff Schmidt. XMLBeans is a Java-XML binding tool that also allows low-level access to the full XML instance Infoset. The technology was developed by BEA and proposed to the Jakarta and XML communities. There had been "[vote] XMLBeans to enter XML incubation" for the accepting this project into Apache XML Project [2]; the XML PMC and XML committers welcomed this project into it unanimously.

The other issues on Incubator Project are as follows:

The Apache Incubator Project is having the dubious honor of "incubating" itself as well as other products. Regarding the Incubator Project itself, there are still basic, fundamental issues that ideally should have been resolved before it started accepting products/projects. As such, things do not progress as smoothly as anticipated. Nevertheless, the following projects are being incubated as we speak:

Tapestry has left the incubator and Lenya is now in the status of incubation via Apache Cocoon Project [7].

For more information about Incubator Project, see the website [8].

XMLBeans

Editor: Cliff Schmidt, Tetsuya Kitahata

XMLBeans is an XML-Java binding tool that uses XML Schema as a basis for generating Java classes to easily access XML instance data. This access to strongly typed data is integrated with a synchronized, cursor-based XML store for complete access to the underlying XML, combining low-level, full access APIs like SAX and DOM with the convenience of Java binding.

XMLBeans has recently been accepted into the incubator. Developers (both new and old) are welcome to join xmlbeans-dev at xml.apache.org and find out more. Also, BEA's quick start page [1] will give you more insight into the XMLBeans.

Over the last six months, we have developed a thriving developer community to provide feedback directly to the development team through a discussion forum. We have invited three of the members of the community to join us as committers, based on their contributions to the development of the product. We are also looking forward to finding additional non-BEA committers from the Apache community during the incubation process. We've also had thousands of users experiment with the technology. Part of the reason for this success has been the availability of sample code and thorough documentation [2].

For more information, see the XMLBeans provisional website [3].

Geronimo

Editor: Ken Kress, Emmanuel Bernard

Apache Geronimo is a new effort coordinated by the Apache Software Foundation to make a J2EE compatible container. There are two main aspects to this project:

For more information, please read:

The Apache James Project

Contributor: Serge Knystautas

We are actively working towards a 2.2 release that will incorporate many of the long-awaited features that have been worked on in the 3.0 branch. We currently have released v2.2.0a9, which is still alpha and incorporating other features, but we expect will have release candidates in the next month or two.

The most notable changes in the 2.2 release will be:

For further information about the Apache James, please visit our website [1].

The Apache Jakarta Project - General

In July, we saw many release of Jakarta subprojects.

You can see the whole Jakarta news from the Jakarta News Page [1]. If you want the news from other jakarta-related projects, see the 'elsewhere' page [2].

In the general mailing list, there were some hot topics.

At first, i18n project proposed by Robert Simpson was targeted mainly the Java Package of the internationalization [3], however, some Jakarta Committers picked up this as more widely, and now thinking about the TLP (Top Level Project) of the ASF.

1. ASF-wide document translation (projects) 2. ASF-wide resource translation projects 3. Non-language-specific i18n module develooment projects 4. general discussion place about i18n/l10n/m17n issues

For those who have concerns and interests in the internationalization/localization projects in the ASF, we are sure to provide the discussion room of this issue, so please let us know [4] if you are interested in.

For participation to the jakarta general mailing list, please go to the mailing list information page.

Project: Jakarta Alexandria

We could not hear the July news from Alexandria Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta BCEL

We could not hear the July news from BSEL Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta BSF

We could not hear the July news from BSF Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Cactus

Cactus Team announced the beta 1 release of Cactus 1.5, in the middle of July. For further information, see the cactus website [1] or the announcement page [2].

Jakarta Commons - General

Contributor:

Jakarta Commons BeanUtils

Editor: Robert Burrell Donkin

BeanUtils [1] is a library providing enhanced reflection and introspection.

It has been clear for some time that the original design decision to use Booch utilities (aka static utility classes) for the key { { { BeanUtils } } } functionality limits the ways that { { { BeanUtils } } } can be customized in a web application environment. This is a major draw back. So, the push over the last few months has been to move { { { BeanUtils } } } over to objects whilst retaining backwards compatibility.

The approach is now starting to pay dividends. Eric Pabst (and others) have provided interesting patches which allow { { { BeanUtils } } } to be pushed forward in new directions. Hopefully, the team will be able to catch up with the bug reports whilst at the same time feeding in some more of these new ideas.

Jakarta Commons Betwixt

Editor: Robert Burrell Donkin

Betwixt [1] is an(other) Object <-> XML mapper. It specializes in dynamic mappings (as opposed to generative solutions based on creating objects from schema or static mappings) with flexible strategies allowing developers to customize mappings programmatically.

It's been a long time since the last release and some users have already been asking when the next one is going to be. There are a number of substantial enhancements requiring extensive refactoring still in progress (thanks to those who submitted those patches - they are being worked on). Another alpha release may well happen once the current crop have been processed.

Support for reading mixed content (that's the text between elements), writing { { { DynaBeans } } } and more powerful control over object to string conversions have been added in the last month so things are now starting to move in the right direction. Also work has been done to improve the unit tests.

Jakarta Commons Modeler

Editor: Yoav Shapira

The Modeler component of the Jakarta Commons subproject offers convenient support for configuring and instantiating Model MBeans (management beans), as described in the JMX Specification.

In July, a release plan was formed and agreed upon for the 1.1 final release of the modeler component. This release is expected to be available by mid August (10th August).

For more information, see the Commons Modeler website [1].

[1] - http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/modeler/

Project: Jakarta ECS

Editor: Robert Burrell Donkin

Jakarta ECS [1] is a mature (venerable, even) framework for creating markup programmatically. A 1.4.2 release maintenance release was made in July. See the Jakarta News Section [2].

Project: Jakarta Gump

Editor: Adam Jack, Nick Chalko

Gump has accumulated 168 modules, providing 380 projects, and continuous integration builds are running nightly on at least five public servers. Of these modules, 20 have delegated their descriptors to project CVS repositories, which allows local management of this. Gump extracts source code from over 24 CVS repositories, with most CVS repositories hosting multiple modules. Recent additions were new modules for jUDDI [1] and Jakarta POI version 3 [2].

In order to improve the process around Gump, it has been added to Bugzilla. Users can submit bug reports and/or requests for change in an organized process.

Gump has suffered some outages, primarily due to: hardware failures (lightening damage), CVS locks on remote CVS servers (hanging CVS updates), and CVS outages in remote servers. Also, with the length of a gump run now exceeds 7 hours, which can leads to build starting generation on one day and ending on another (exposing a @@DATE@@ problem).

Although "SUCCESS" builds are the norm, there are numerous "PREREQ FAILURE" when builds are marked as "FAILED". This represents healthy project sharing/re-use/cooperation, which is exactly what Gump to promotes and facilitates. The nightly gump output (see the latest build result of gump [3]) reads like a dashboard on the state of "Open Source Sharing".

Gump is starting to see more use as "personal" Gumps, where the modules/projects that are not all available for public CVS access can benefit from continuous integration, Additionally, some installations are for a "trimmed stack" for build speed/focus.

As a corollary, gump is seeing more use with "packages" (pre-installed base software) -- reducing build time, and focusing the builds on specific software. Nick Chalko contributed the ability for gump to convert module definitions to "nobuild" equivalents, on the fly. These descriptors contain the <jar information (for CLASSPATH dependencies) but no <ant/<cvs/<script directives. As such, they convey the jar metadata without invoking a build. This allows for package-based builds of the original metadata, removing manual editing.

Further, a *nix gump.sh script is evolving to allow a standard build process (combining the various gump build steps) to make it easier for users to install/run their own gumps.

Are you interested? See Jakarta Gump Project Website [4] for more details.

Project: Jakarta Jetspeed

Editor: Santiago Gala

There has been a lot of things going on in the Jetspeed project [1]: The JSR-168 Portlet API was published, unveiling a proposal, originally rooted in the Jetspeed project two years ago, to have a standard way to specify the interaction between a Portal and its components, called portlets. A lot of the traffic on the lists has been about discussion of the API and of the forthcoming jetspeed-2 code base, which is under development and will be JSR-168 compliant.

The rest of the traffic is the preparation of the final release of the Jetspeed 1 line, which will be in maintenance mode after it is released.

The new CVS Repository can be found from here [2].

---

Project: Jakarta JMeter

We could not hear the July news from JMeter [1], however, JMeter Team announced the JMeter 1.9 Final Release early in August [2]. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta Log4J

We could not hear the July news from Log4J [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta Lucene

We could not hear the July news from Lucene [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta ORO

We could not hear the July news from ORO [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta POI

Editor: Tetsuya Kitahata, Andrew C. Oliver

We saw a series of POI 2.0 rel release (POI 2.0-pre2 and POI 2.0-pre3) in July. HDF has been abandoned for a new codebase called HWPF (port of Microsoft Word file format). The 3.0 release is shaping up to be primarily geared towards performance and memory consumption improvements. Besides the work on the HEAD (which doesn't yet pass all unit tests) that will eventually branch to the 3.0 release, Chris Nokelburg has donated a new implementation of POIFS which supports memory mapping and other techniques. These changes will be incorporated in 3.0.

WHAT IS POI?

The POI project consists of APIs for manipulating various file formats based upon Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format using pure Java. In short, you can read and write MS Excel files using Java. Reading property information is also supported. Work continues on reading and writing the MS Word format.

For more information, see the Jakarta POI website [1] and POI News [2]. Also, we are waiting your participation to our mailing lists! [3]

Project: Jakarta Regexp

We could not hear the July news from Regexp [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta Slide

We could not hear the July news from Slide [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta Struts

We could not hear the July news from Struts [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta Taglibs

We could not hear the July news from Taglibs [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta Tomcat

Tomcat 4.1.27 has been released, fixing number of security issues which were recently discovered, and integrating other bugfixes. When downloading it, make sure to also download and install the hotfix fixing a regression in webapp reloading (bugzilla item 22096).

Tomcat 5.0 release plan was voted, and is now quickly making its way towards beta, with a focus on bugfixing. Many old, long standing, Tomcat issues which needed non trivial refactoring are addressed during this period.

For more information, see the Tomcat Website [1] and join to the mailing lists of ours [2].

Project: Jakarta Turbine

We could not hear the July news from Turbine [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

Project: Jakarta Velocity

Editor: Nathan Bubna

Velocity Tools [1] [2] version 1.0 has been released. This project provides servlets and tools for rapid, flexible, MVC web development with Velocity, tools for using Velocity with the Struts framework, and a set of generic tools to help with any Velocity project.

Since the release work has rapidly progressed on development of support for the new features in Struts 1.1. Support for ActionMessages, Tiles, and modules has been implemented, and support for Validator should follow soon.

Project: Jakarta Watchdog

We could not hear the July news from Watchdog [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

The Apache Maven Project

July saw the beta-10 release of Apache Maven 1.0, which can be downloaded from "Download Area" [1].

See The Apache Maven Home Page [2] for more details.

The Apache Perl Project

We could not hear the July news from Apache Perl Project [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

The Apache TCL Project

We could not hear the July news from Apache TCL Project [1] Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

The Apache WS Project - General

Editor: Tom Jordahl

The Apache Web Service project is off to a good start. We have 5 project currently under the Web Services umbrella: Axis, SOAP (inactive - maintenence only), WSIF, WSIL, and XML-RPC. The PMC is currently finishing up a VOTE on the Web Services charter [1] and is voting on a proposal to add the Charon [2] project.

There is a PROPOSAL to create a WS-Commons project [3] and along with a few projects that might fit in nicely, a WS-Security API [4] and a Schema API [5].

If you are interested in helping out in any of these areas, particularly the WS-Commons projects, please sign up on the wiki pages.

For more information, see the Apache Web Service website [6].

The Apache WS Project - Axis

Editor: Tom Jordahl

Axis released version 1.1 on June 16, 2003. The team is considering what features and changes to include in the next (1.2) release. We have recently warmly welcomed new committers Toshiyuki Kimura (Toshi), Eric Friedman, Andras Avar and Rick Kellogg.

One recent change to the codebase is in XML encoding -Axis1.1 and earlier encoding was both inefficient at times, and illegal at others (it would send \u0000 down the wire). This is now fixed: because SOAP only supports UTF8 and UTF16 encoding, the encoding process is easier than for, say Xerces. A big hand to Jens Schumann for his effort!

We are also pleased to see Doug Davis committing again, backporting some changes made to Axis for IBM's ETTK product. Specifically, there is now a plug in mechanism to respond to ?wsdl and other queries made of a service endpoint, so you can now define your own handlers for these requests. Hopefully he will have other interesting additions to make in the near future...

There have been now obvious "why didn't we see that" defects reported against Axis1.1 yet, though one late breaking change regarding timeouts is troublesome. In Axis1.0 there was no timeout waiting for responses at all, which is wrong. In Axis1.1 the timeout was set to 60 seconds, which is proving too short for some services. Although end users can set it, the setting mechanism is Axis-specific, and so not compatible with other JAX-RPC implementations. We need to come up with a more compatible mechanism and perhaps increase the default timeout to a few minutes.

Editor: Susantha Kumara

Now the Axis C++ enables a web services developer to deploy web services written in C++.

Axis C++ team is happy to announce the C++ implementation of SOAP engine. The server side implementation is available and client side on the way. The C++ based SOAP engine adopts most of Axis Java architecture. However it features several architecture changes geared for performance. Notably Axis C++ uses a web service wrapping concept that solves the need of type mapping and dynamic loading that leads to performance. Currently wrapper class generation tool is used for deployment of web service classes which cuts down the effort needed by the web service developer. Some other variants of this wrapper class generation tool are planned for deploying C, COM and CORBA components as web services. Modules, including the currently functional Apache web server module for Apache 1.3, are being developed that allow Axis C++ to be plugged in to popular web servers such as Apache and Microsoft IIS.

Listed below are the current set of features of Axis C++ server side SOAP engine.

Partial support for both SOAP 1.1 & 1.2 Supports all xml basic types Supports Complex types and arrays Deployment tool that converts C++ classes to dynamically deployable Libraries The Handler architecture same as Axis Java WSDD based deployment same as Axis Java Supports RPC style web services Test suite for interoperability tests    The Handler architecture with the WSDD based deployment concept makes Axis C++ a highly configurable and extensible SOAP engine. The WSDD in combination with the handler architecture allows pluggable handlers that enables dynamic configuration of the Axis engine.

In contrast to Axis java, the C++ implementation adopts a pull mechanism for XML parsing that leads to performance.

Axis C++ provides an API for adding transport modules which allows Axis to work with multiple transport protocols. The current transport module for Apache HTTP server is written for this API. This API depicts XML-Pull parsing nature of Axis C++.

The initial release of Axis C++ 1.0 is expected to be out in mid September with following features,

Full SOAP 1.2 support WSDL2C++ and WSDL2C prototyping tools. A fully functional Wrapper Class generator Suite Portability of code base for Windows/Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris/AIX Web server plug-ins for Apache, IIS and Tomcat Comprehensive documentation and Samples XML pull parser integration, proper error handling, Web interface to Axis documentation and unit tests.

WS SOAP WS WSIF WS WSIL WS XML-RPC

We could not hear the July news from SOAP [1], WSIF [2], WSIL [3] nor XML-RPC [4] Project Team. I hope to hear the wonderful news in the next newsletter -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

The Apache XML Project - General

We've had a quarter with a fair bit of general activity. The XMLBeans product has been accepted into incubation by the project as a whole. The proposal generated a great level of discussion amongst the xml project community, and ended in a positive result, with a clear understanding of what issues the xml community feel need to be addressed during the incubation process.

Issues needing attention:

The xml-security sub-project is starting work on C++ and Java implementations of the W3C XML Encryption standard. Whilst not implementing encryption algorithms directly, we will be making use of other libraries that have such functionality.

After discussions with various parties within Apache, the xml-security team understands that working on such an implementation will not cause any export issues provided :

Only source code is released (i.e. no compiled versions of the libraries can be made available). An e-mail is sent to Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) informing them of the location of the code available for download. The format of this email can be found at http://www.bxa.doc.gov/encryption/PubAvailEncSourceCodeNofify.html . We seek the endorsement of the board for this approach, and would ask who such an e-mail should come from.

The Apache XML Project - { { { AxKit } } }

Editor: Jörg Walter

{ { { On the 29th of July, AxKit 1.6.2 was released. It is a collection of many bug fixes, especially regarding charset/encoding issues and processing order of AxAdd*Processor directives. AxKit now runs fine with Perl up to 5.8.0. Some features were added, most interestingly attribute value interpolation in XSP pages. Also, now we have a much improved test suite which is run every night to ensure nothing breaks. You can read the full announcement [1].  } } } 

{ { { Meanwhile, our plans for AxKit 2.0 are getting more publicity, so here is a preliminary overview of what that release will bring us:  } } } 

{ { { AxKit 2.0 will be designed for mod_perl 2.0 exclusively. We will keep the 1.x tree and fix bugs in there for mod_perl 1.x users, but major development will happen in the AxKit 2.0 branch once it exists. One of the most important features of the AxKit 2.0 release is a completely new processing pipeline system, which allows you to configure processing, caching and tracing in any combination you like. This is good news for all XSP-after-XSLT users, now you can finally get partial caching. It is very likely that we will overhaul the configuration system as well, since pipeline configuration is getting hairy for many cases.  } } } 

{ { { We do not yet have a definite timeline, and it is quite likely that we will release AxKit 2.0 after mod_perl 2.0 is released, so don't hold your breath. AxKit 1.x is not yet abandoned, and we expect another release or two until then. You may want to take a look at the Petal templating language, people say they've seen Matt sneaking around that module for some time... :-)  } } } 

For more information, see the Axkit website [2].

The Apache XML Project - Batik

The Batik project had a release in July just prior to the SVG Open conference in Vancouver. The release came with a fairly large number of bug fixes, improvements and a lot of work on the test infrastructure. We will likely do a patch release in September as there have been a couple important improvements done by Thomas DeWeese after the release and there are a few regressions to patch.

For more information, see the Apache Batik website [1].

The Apache XML Project - Commons

Editor: Shane Curcuru

The xml-commons project has made slow and quiet progress. The Xalan-J and Xerces-J committers are collaborating on the xml-apis code to maintain a branch that can be used to pass the JAXP 1.2 TCK for their projects. We hope to make new maintenance releases soon of both the resolver and which utilities, which just need some docs/release manager volunteer time.

For more information, see the XML-Commons website [1].

The Apache XML Project - FOP

Almost a year after the last release the FOP team released version 0.20.5 of XML-Apache's Formatting Objects Processor on July 18th [1]. This is the last planned release from the maintenance branch. In addition to supporting this new version on our FOP mailing lists, the team is also working on the redesign and coding for our future 1.0 release. The distribution directory has been migrated to the new location to make the downloads mirrorable [3] - which seems to work well according to the Apache Stats made by Vadim Gritsenko where he recently added FOP [4]. Although the new FOP logo [5] has been voted some time ago there's still some tweaking needed [6].

For more information, see the Apache FOP website [2].

The Apache XML Project - Forrest

Contributor: Jeff Turner

"Forrest" [1], for those who don't know, is an XML-based documentation system built on Cocoon, used to build sites like !The Apache XML Website': http://xml.apache.org/ [2]

Forrest is currently in a stable phase, waiting on some Cocoon improvements before a 0.5 release is made. Significant progress has been made since 0.4. Most notably, the monolithic sitemap has been divided into functional categories and logical layers, with the aim of making Forrest sites easier to maintain, and new features easier to add [3]. There are numerous new features, including:

Forrest gained two new committers, Juan José Pablos, and Leo Simons (who wrote a Maven plugin, waiting to be checked in). In addition, all Cocoon committers were granted karma to Forrest CVS, in recognition of the close ties between these projects.

Tentative plans for the next release include:

Join us on forrest-dev@xml.apache.org [6] if you have questions or would like to participate.

The Apache XML Project - Xalan-C++

Xalan-C 1.6 was released on 11 August. Highlights include:

"Sane includes" changes.

For more information, see the Xalan-C++ Project website [1].

The Apache XML Project - Xerces-C++

Good progress being made. 2.4.0 planned for release in the autumn with new features including persistent grammars. No new committers.

For more information about Xerces-C++. please visit our website [1]

The Apache XML Project - Xerces-J

Xerces-J 2.5.0 was released in late July. As well as the usual plethora of bugfixes, this release marked the completion of Xerces-J's PSVI/XML Schema Component Model support via implementation of annotation components. The product was also upgraded to conform to the latest DOM level 3 Core and Load/Save Working Drafts, and an experimental XInclude partial implementation was added. Finally, one new committer--K Venugopal--was accepted into the subproject.

For more information, see the Xerces-J Project website [1].

The Apache XML Project - Xerces-P

Xerces-P made an experimental 2.3 release. This included support for handling the config.status file of Xerces-C to improve cross platform support. Two announcements were made from users who successfully compiled the 2.3 release under Windows, however no binary release for windows is available yet.

For more information, see the Xerces-P Project website [1].

The Apache XML Project - Xindice

Xindice is still trying to put together the 1.1 release, so far with mixed results and a couple of failed attempts. The good news is that the community has got two new committers: Vadim Gritsenko and Kevin O'Neill joined Xindice in late July, and results are encouraging, with discussions and CVS commits flowing at a very good rate.

For more information, visit the Xindice website [1].

The Apache XML Project - { { { XML-Security } } }

The XML-Security sub-project has just release version 1.0.0 of the C++ library, supporting the W3C XML Digital Signature standard. Work will now move to creating a C++ implementation of the XML Encryption standard.

Work continues in the Java library to further develop encryption support.

There has also been a fair amount of discussion around the potential legal ramifications for Apache of releasing a library that makes use of encryption algorithms. (See legal issues above.)

For more information, see the XML-Security website [1].

The PHP Project - General

We could not hear the July news from PHP Project Team, however, php project has a nice news release system. See the PHP Website for more information [1]. -- by Tetsuya Kitahata

The Apache Infrastructure Team Report

Editor: Noel J. Bergman

The major changes were the addition of minotaur as the new CVS server, the removal of icarus (the previous CVS server), and the fact that the ASF is now located in a new co-location facility with its own rack and cage. Minotaur is a powerful system, and may allow new uses, e.g., moving the Cocoon wiki to Apache hardware, allowing Jakarta to run parts of its site on Tomcat, etc. Those possibilities are still being investigated. With the new co-location facility, the ASF is open for donations of rack mountable components, e.g., new servers.

New Committers

Readers' Voice

<<Please feel free to write the comments on the Jakarta Newsletter issue #9 -- previous newsletter>>

ApacheNewsletterDrafts/Issue1 (last edited 2009-09-20 23:33:07 by localhost)