PMC

The following people have been added to the XML PMC to make representation project based:

  

  

Batik is in the process of finding a representative.

This report is the first from the new PMC.

Issues needing attention:

There is still a lot of confusion over licensing policy. The common questions are:

  1. Is is okay to use the short license
  2. Can we include software that uses license foo

It would be a big help if these issues could be resolved by placing the definitive answers on a web page.

Axkit

Following a short lull while various committers coped with the largely uninteresitng details of Real Life, AxKit development has renewed with vigor. Version 1.6.1 (a bugfix and minor features release) was announced on Feb. 28th 2003 and we are currently accepting feature requests for v 1.7

Recent highlights include:

OpenOffice.org file format Provider (allows users to trasparently publish/transform XML content form unaltered OpenOffice documents).

Perhaps the most exciting news from the last months (from a non-rechnical point of view) is AxKit's appearance in February's Security Space Apache Modules Report-- indicating a marked increase in the number of sites running AxKit worldwide.

Batik

Commons

The xml-commons project has continued in it's slow growth over the past quarter; with some luck and timing, we'll be doing a lot more in the coming quarter.

The biggest news is our policy change to a per-tool release system. Once we finish the appropriate doc work, we'll have releases for each of the separate components we currently have in xml-commons: xml-apis.jar, resolver.jar, and which.jar.

We've added one new committer, Norman Walsh, who donated his popular XML catalog Resolver tool to the xml-commons project. We've had the 1.0 release of resolver.jar, and after incorporating user feedback we'll have a second release very soon.

Development on the xml-apis.jar (the external, standards-based portion of xml-commons: JAXP, SAX, and DOM interfaces) is taking place on two main branches. The HEAD branch has mostly the latest-and-greatest code of each standard; there isn't much current work happening here.

The primary work is happening on the tck-jaxp-1_2_0 branch, where committers from both Xerces-J and Xalan-J are updating code to pass the appropriate Sun-provided TCK test compatibility kit for JAXP 1.2. As soon as we have this finished, we'll have an xml-apis.jar release that we know will pass the TCK and that any Apache projects wish to use can pull down.

The other big news has been David Crossley's great work on forrestizing the doc set for xml-commons, including working with the forrest community to better support our multi-project doc needs.

FOP

   

FOP maintains 2 main development tracks:

Given our limited resources we're having trouble bringing the redesign forward. From time to time the whole redesign descision is attacked but lately, there wasn't enough power anymore to power that discussion. So we hope that the whole team can concentrate on the redesign once 0.20.5 is out (expected 2003-02-28). We still haven't convinced all developers (in contrast to committers) to join the redesign effort but we're making progress. In short, we suffer from the problem of a huge user base and only a small set of active developers and committers.

The good news is that the redesigned FOP does already handle the most important things even if its progress is slow. We hope to make a developer release 1.0 this year.

We have one big problem right now: We've realized that most of our hyphenation pattern files must be removed from CVS because of licences. The files were mostly adapted from Tex hyphenation files. Some are GPL, some LPPL (not LGPL!) and some have something else with occasional commercial-use restrictions. We're in the process of resolving these issues. We may need help from higher up, I guess. We'll get in touch

Forrest

In (just over) the last 3 months, Forrest has been rapidly progressing, and has made its first three major releases ([1] [2] [3]), using the new mirrors system. Progress has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and backwards-compatibility has been maintained across releases.

Community-wise, Forrest has gained a fair number of new users, and many technically astute contributors on the mailing list. However, core development has remained limited to a handful of people, and no new committers have been nominated. Symbiosis with Cocoon remains strong.

Bug reporting was moved to a JIRA install on Steven's box[4], which also hosts Forrest's prototype continuous build tool, Forrestbot[5].

Licensing seems to all be in order. The few non-ASF jars in use all have licenses in legal/, and all seem innocuous.

[1] 0.2: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-apache-announce&m=103746673310573&w=2

[2] 0.3: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-apache-announce&m=104399934113331&w=2

[3] 0.4: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-announce&m=104510734501302&w=2

[4] http://issues.cocoondev.org/jira/secure/Dashboard.jspa

[5] http://forrestbot.cocoondev.org/

Xalan-C ++

A second committer: Berin Lautenbach has joined David Bertoni to work on Xalan-C++!

An interim build, built with Xerces 2.1 was released at the end of October, 2002.

Xalan-J/XSLTC

Two new committers: Gordon Chiu and Ramesh Mandava have joined the team.

Active work is happening on 3 branches. Currently, the HEAD branch is focused mainly on bug fixes. A developers release is planned for the end of this week. The XSLTC_DTM branch is focused on the integration of the DTM and serializers so Xalan-J and XSLTC can synchronize on a more common code base. The XSLT20 branch is where the implementation of the XSLT2.0 and XPath 2.0 drafts is continuing in earnest!

Xerces-C++

New committer: Gareth Reakes.

Xerces-C++ 2.2.0 was released at the early Feb, 2003.

Xerces-J

Things have been relatively quiet in Xerces-J land in the last three months: in mid-November, we released version 2.2.1, which was primarily a bugfix release; and in late January, we released 2.3.0. The latter release is noteworthy because it marks the stabilization of the Xerces Native Interface.

Xerces-P

Xindice

Xindice is slowly warming up again after a period of little activity. We are now getting closer to a release of version 1.1, with a beta due in the next few days. More important, however, the committers are ready to face the challenge of moving to version 2.0, with possibly a different (more componentized) architecture and a change in the internal database system. The last three months were spent in finishing up the XML-RPC layer and the embedded driver, squashing some annoying bugs with XUpdate, moving the documentation to Forrest and getting ready to have a 1.1 release with a couple of significant improvements over 1.0: UTF-8 compliance and drop of CORBA in favor of XML-RPC. I think no new committers were voted in in this period.

XML-Security

XML Security has been ping-ponged between WS and XML. We expect XML Security to return to XML after the 2/19/2003 Board meeting

XMLProjectPages/StatusReportForFeb192003 (last edited 2009-09-20 23:32:21 by localhost)