General Comments
A reasonably quiet quarter. The foundation progresses, and XML Graphics (comprising Fob and Batik) and Xalan have now been approved by the board as TLPs. Activity has been picked up again for Xerces, so we are coming close to the end of the road.
This report is not as complete as it normally would be. The delinquent PMC chair neglected to take into account the fact the board meeting was brought forward a week, and so has somewhat failed in his duty.
Issues needing attention:
The JuiCE sub-project in the incubator is still waiting on action on the corpriate CLA from uni of memphis.
Axkit
Due to the slowdown in the AxKit project, both in terms of community and the developers, we have decided to re-merge the dev and users lists to ensure that users are aware that we are actually doing some things to the code. I have emailed infrastructure with the request to migrate the users list to Apache infrastructure (currently hosted on my personal DSL line) so we can proceed with the merge. I await a response (unless it got lost by my spam filters). In the meantime bugs are being fixed, and we are working with the XML::LibXML developers to resolve the libxml input filters conflicts with other perl and PHP projects and should resolve that issue soon.
We also need to work on migrating axkit.org to Apache infrastructure as I am moving to Canada in about 6 weeks and so the urgency of this has increased. I will try and coordinate with infrastructure@ on this. This is complicated by the hosting of a number of non-apache open source projects on the axkit.org domain.
Commons
Xerces-C++ Released Xerces 2.6 at the end of September. Many bug fixes. Moved to 2.0 license. Ongoing discussions ragrding moving Xerces to a top level project. Proposed charter being finalised now.
Xerces-J
Xerces-J 2.7.0 is still a work in progress. The completion of this release is pending on the donation of the portions of JAXP 1.3 developed by Sun Microsystems for the JAXP 1.3 reference implementation. In October, Sun expressed their interest in donating this work to Apache and the community began discussing how best to integrate the code in Xerces (as well as in Xalan and XML-Commons). Our understanding is that Apache and Sun are attempting to work out the details of a software grant for this code, and that both parties are committed to the resolution of these issues. Since JAXP is of central importance to Xerces-J, the community ardently hopes that these final hurdles will be resolved soon so that we can begin the integration work and soon thereafter release Xerces 2.7.0. We have one new committer to report: Ankit Pasricha was voted in during the last weeks of October. Discussion has continued on the migration of Xerces-* to a top-level project. The composition and chairmanship of the PMC and the proposed charter are being reviewed and finalized. We're hopeful that a motion to transform Xerces to a TLP may be moved within days.
Xerces-P
Xindice
XML-Security
The Java library is now progressing towards a 1.2 release, with RC-1 currently being reported on by users. Work has been concentrating on an XKMS implementation within the C++ library, and Berin Lautenbach has been doing interoperability testing with the C++ code and the W3C workging group on the XKMS standard. We now have a full implementation of X-KISS and work has commenced on X-KRSS.