General Comments
A fairly quiet quarter on the overall project front, although good activity within most of the sub-projects. Much effort has gone into discussion around the Federation proposal, and this is where the PMC has been concentrating its efforts.
The project has voted in a new sub-project - JuiCE. This is a JCE provider based on OpenSSL with an initial code-base donated by Internet2. It is ramping up in the Incubator, although sorting out CLAs for the initial committers has taken longer than expected. As we transition to a Federated model, it is likely that this will move with the XML-Security project - possibly into a security or crypto related TLP.
XMLBeans is also getting closer to release from Incubator, and is currently working through how to ensure a balanced committer group. Again, the Federation issue has caused some discussion around whether XMLBeans will come out of the incubator as a TLP within the XML Federation, or as a sub-project to start with.
PMC
The PMC has been focussed on executing the Federation proposal. Four proposals are currently being concentrated on :
Xerces: There has been much discussion around how the language based parser implementations would come together in the overall project, and how other "sub-projects" might work in with them. This is not so much a discussion of whether or not it should be done as a discussion around how the mechanics will work.
AxKit: The AxKit team have done a lot of work detailing out an operating model for a new TLP. The team seems comfortable with the idea of a move, so I am hopeful we may have a resolution to put before the board at the next meeting.
XML Graphics: Batik and FOP are looking to create a consolodated PMC. Batik has been very quiet lately (all committers otherwise engaged), which has lead to discussions as to whether or not to just go with FOP in the intial move.
Xalan: This started up using the same model as Xerces. Fairly much on hold whilst we work through the issues with Xerces.
Much of the effort with all of these has been around ensuring people are very clear about what this means and why it is being done. Most of the sub-projects are fairly comfortable with the way things work today and need to be comfortable that we are not causing them unnecessary overheads by heading down this path.
My feeling has been that it is important to take as much time as it needs to ensure everyone is comfortable with what is going on, so I've not been trying to push people into moving fast.
Issues needing attention:
The JuiCE effort needs to put a submission to BIS for exporting cryptographic code. We also need to make a submission to Sun requesting a code signing certificate (to enable the crypto in the provider in later JDKs). This will require a statement from the ASF indicating that we understand we are bound by the US export laws. Given we do understand this, the PMC chair will be signing on behalf of the ASF.
Axkit
Work continues toward a 1.7 release:
- Optimized Provider class interfaces to reduce redundant processing during style extraction phase.
Fixed bug that resulted in undesireable redirection for certain URLs when the AxHandleDirs option is set to On.
- Accepted for review 2 user-submitted patches to extend the directory listing interface to allow for greater flexibility (richer metadata).
- Additional smaller bug fixes/general code clean-up.
Much discussion surrounding AxKit's potential migration to a Top-Level Project resulted in a consensus for a proposed Mission Statement and Project Guidelines. Details here: http://axkit.org/wiki/view/AxKit/TLPGuidelineProposal
More informally, the AxKit development team and larger users community was excited to hear that one of our users, running modest hardware and the latest version of AxKit, was able to cope with the load associated with a good old fashioned Slashdotting without dropping a single request.
Batik
Some discussion has started on moving Batik to the XML Graphics Top Level Project.
Commons
There were no official releases in the Commons project recently. We have had some volunteers from Xalan helping out to migrate to the 2.0 license and fixing up some documentation. Note that if most XML projects decide to move to their own PMCs that Commons will need to be careful to either get enough attention from the PMC or should move to the Xalan PMC (since Xalan re-ships most of the 'common' code here).
FOP
2 new committers: Clay Leeds and Simon Pepping.
Still working slowly towards a 1.0 developer release with no date in sight, however. Changed to Apache Licence 2.0 for CVS HEAD and alt-design branch, the maintenance branch is frozen and hasn't been upgraded.
Forrest
We continue to make solid steps towards the 0.6 release:
- Changed to Apache License 2.0 in source files and commenced investigation of the distributed libaries.
- Lots of work has been done to eliminate the copying of resources during build time
- Forrestbot2 nearly ready for general use
- Build system refactorings
- Working on a more maintainable skin configuration system
- Commenced discsussion (i.e. at internal Proposal stage) about Forrest becoming a top-level project
Xalan-C++
Xalan-C++ 1.8 was released on May 3, 2004.
Xalan-C++ version 1.8 is an implementation of the W3C Recommendations for XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 and the XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0. It was tested for compatibility with the Xerces-C++ XML parser version 2.5.0.
The release included:
- Upgrade from Xerces-C 2.4 to Xerces-C 2.5
- Build support for the new platforms Cygwin, HP-UX 11.00 on Itanium
- Project files for supporting Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
Additional changes to the Xerces Deprecated DOM support. This is another step towards phasing out the support for Xerces Deprecated DOM. Users are encouraged to modify their applications to interface with the new Xerces DOM support. For more information on the effects of these changes to your build environment, see http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/readme.html#xercesdepdom
- Implemented optimizations to significantly improve the throughput of the ICU-enabled "format-number" function.
- Changes in the XML Serializer, the serializer will no longer put a newline after the xml header tag unless indent="yes". See bugzilla 24304 and 28386.
- Apache 2.0 License updates
- Bug fixes
Details are at http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/readme.html.
A new committer, Dmitry Hayes, was nominated and voted in as a committer on Xalan-C++ on February 19, 2004.
Xalan-J/XSLTC
Xalan-J 2.6.0 was released in February 29, 2004 (yes the 29-th). It was tested for compatibility with the Xerces-Java XML parser version 2.6.2 which is packaged in the distribution.
The release included:
- The usual bug fixes
- Improvement in translet initialization time
- Addition of a translet versioning mechanism
- Changes that allow XSLTC to use other DTM implementations
- Changes in the XML Serializer, the serializer will no longer put a newline after the xml header tag unless indent="yes". See bugzilla 24304.
Addition of a TransformThread sample that demonstrates how to use different transformers on different threads and in different modes.
- Upgrade to Xerces-Java 2.6.2
- Elimination of "enum" as a name to allow compilation under JDK 1.5
- Upgrade to the Apache Software License Version 2.0 (some License clean up is continuing)
Two new committers have joined, Sarah McNamara, and Joanne Tong who were nominated and voted in as committers on Xalan-Java in late February, and early March of 2004.
Xerces-C++ We released Xerces-C 2.5.0 on 16th February. This was primarily a bug fix release, but as binary compatibility was not maintained a major version number was used. We have switched over to using JIRA for issue tracking and all bugs have been moved across from Bugzilla. We have not yet migrated to the Apache 2.0 license; that is planned well in advance of the next release. Xerces-C 2.6.0 will be out in the late summer / early autumn.
Extensive discussion has been occuring over how Xerces would operate as a top level project.
Xerces-J
On February 20th, we released Xerces-J 2.6.2. As well as containing a few performance improvements and several minor bug fixes, this release fixes several bugs which a number of users encountered with version 2.6.1. Soon after this release we successfully completed migration to the Apache 2.0 license.
Recently the committers decided that we would adopt JIRA for issue tracking. Existing bug reports from Bugzilla have been migrated to JIRA. The next Xerces-J release, 2.7.0, is planned in the near future. Development items include the latest versions of SAX, DOM Level 3, JAXP and XInclude.
In the last month or so, the committers in all the Xerces-* communities have been discussing the possibility of converting Xerces to a top-level project. We're hoping to have a resolution to present to the Board by the next meeting; the consensus so far has been that this is a good idea, though there are still some details with respect to organization that need to be worked out.
Xerces-P
Nothing to report for this period. No decision has been made on any level wheter Xerces-P should be made a sub-project of Xerces-C.
Xindice
- Changed to Apache License 2.0
- Obtained software grant for Xindice Eclipse plugin (currently in Attic)
- Released Xindice 1.1b4
XML-Security
Released 1.1 of both the C++ and Java libraries. In both cases, the major advance has been an implementation of the W3C's XML Encryption standard.
A large amount of performance work has been done by Raul Benito.
Finally, we voted in a new committer (Vishal Mahajan).