General Comments
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.
PMC
The PMC has updated the charter document, and is going through a vote process to formalise this new version. This will hopefully be completed in the next few weeks.
Christian Geuer-Pollmann retired from the PMC and a replacement has been nominated from the xml-security project (yet to be voted on within the PMC).
Issues needing attention:
Legal
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.
Technical
xml.apache.org projects need to take advantage of the ASF mirroring system. This will become more important as the infrastructure team begins moving services to our new server. The project is currently putting a plan together to do this over the next few months.
Axkit
We recently released AxKit 1.6.2 (which included uploading a signed tarball to apache.org's servers <grin/>). This was a minor bug fix release, including features to "do the right thing" with external resources (such as file metadata) stored in non-utf-8 encodings, and adds attribute-value-templates to XSP. We have also added a unit test suite (thanks to Kip Hampton for finally taking the stand to do this) and it now runs nightly on axkit.org as a smoke test for new developments. Further work still goes into AxKit 2.0 (which will work only on Apache 2.0), and we expect a 1.6.3 release to be not too far around the corner due to a couple of important bug fixes in CVS. We also gained a new committer, Mike Chamberlain, who is working mostly on AxKit 2.0 now.
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.
Commons
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. - ShaneCurcuru
FOP
There was a FOP release, 0.20.5 in July which has a few improvements and bugfixes. This release is intended to be the last release from the maintenance code branch. Unfortunately, progress on the main code branch is very slow. The distribution directory has been migrated to the new location to make the downloads mirrorable.
Forrest
Forrest has been quietly progressing over the last few months. We hope to make a 0.5 release soon, and not before time since 0.4 was back in February. We have voted in 2 new committers. In addition, all Cocoon developers have been granted commit access, reflecting strong cross-project ties. No new dependencies or legal issues.
Xalan-C ++
Xalan-C 1.6 was released on 11 August. Highlights include:
Xalan-J/XSLTC
Xalan-J 2.5.1 was released in early June. The release included:
documentation updates and bug fixes (see http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/readme.html)
- performance patches to the serializer and to XSLTC
An alternate binary distribution which contains XSLTC and Xalan-Interpretive in separate jar files. See: http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/downloads.html for more information on the packaging in the two distributions.
A great deal of effort in the quarter was spent improving performance for the 2.5.1 release and beyond in the current version in CVS. The improvement has been noted by some of our users, which means that it is often more than a few percent. Finally, one new committer, Igor Hersht, was accepted into the subproject.
Xerces-C++
Good progress being made. 2.4.0 planned for release in the autumn with new features including persistent grammars. No new committers.
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.
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.
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.
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.)