April 2007 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).

These reports are due to the Incubator PMC by 11 April 2007

Incubator PMC members, please add your handle on the iPMC Reviewers: line if you have taken the time and accept the report as presented. E.g. iPMC Reviewers: noel, wrowe.

DO NOT modify reviewed reports, please; add further Q & A after the crux of the original report. This makes it simpler to preserve accepted reports.

CXF

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

Project name - CXF

Description - SOA enabling framework, web services toolkit

Date of entry - August, 2006

Top three items to resolve -

  1. Diversity - Active commiters are still 90% IONA people 2. Growth of community - related to diversity. The traffic on both the users and dev lists is growing with new people jumping in, but still is mostly IONA folks. 3. Mentor status - recent discussion on general@i.a.o suggested we really need three active mentors. We currently only have 2 mentors total, only one of which has been active. (the other is getting back up to speed though.)

Community aspects:

  • Voted in Jarek Gawor as a committer due to his excellent work on JAX-WS compliancy fixes.
  • Have been working closely with Geronimo to integrate CXF into the next version of Geronimo.
  • Have started working with Camel folks to define requirements and produce API's that allow CXF to work well with Camel

Code aspects:

  • Started to finalize the next milestone release. There are a few remaining features we need to finish.
  • Ongoing TCK testing may require unexpected code changes.
  • Very long ongoing discussions about some of the transport API's. Resolutions on these are slow going.

FtpServer

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

Description: FtpServer is a Java based implementation of the RFC covering different aspects of FTP.

Since the last board report, the main activity within FtpServer has been a rather large rewrite to create an Apache MINA based network implementation. The aim with this is to leverage the asynchronous IO library to get better scalability. The initial performance tests shows that this has been successful and that FtpServer now can handle significant loads. Besides this major work, many minor issues has been closed, mostly based on feedback from users.

As reported previously, FtpServer has very few active commiters. Currently, there is only one. This is, for many reasons a big problem and one that we need to resolve. A discussion was started on general@i.a.o ton address this. Among many good ideas, one was to seek closer cooperation with Tomcat and write a FTP connector for Tomcat. This is something we will pursue both based on technical (Tomcat is a very stable runtime to base FtpServer on) and community merits. With this, we hope to possibly attract Tomcat developers into the joys of FTP.

We also need to reach out using articles, blog posts and talks. No significant progress has been made in this area since the last report.

iPMC questions / comments:

  • jukka: Incubating since 2003-03-29

Graffito

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin

Graffito is a framework for content-based applications, especially in portlet environments. Graffito entered incubation on September 20, 2004.

Despite recent efforts the level of activity within the Graffito project remains low. The only part of the project that enjoys continued interest and commit activity is the JCR Mapping component, whose transfer into a subproject of Apache Jackrabbit is being prepared.

There is little indication that the level of activity within other parts of the Graffito project would increase in future, so we will most likely request termination of the project as dormant as soon as the JCR Mapping component has been moved to Apache Jackrabbit.

Heraldry

iPMC Q+A:

  • (rdonkin) IMHO the iPMC should report the actions it has taken WRT the heraldry reboot

Ivy

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

Project name - Ivy

Description - Ivy is a dependencies management tool mostly used in combination with Apache Ant

Date of entry - October 23rd, 2006

Top three items to resolve:

  1. Growth of commiters - We are still only two commiters, which is not enough to ensure the future of Ivy 2. Release - We haven't made any release in the incubator yet, so we still don't know if we are able to release. 3. Growth of community - We have a pretty active user community, seeing more with more involvement in the project would help.

Community aspects:

  • We have had contributions in patches from 7 contributors since our entry in the Incubator.
  • Some contributors are actively discussing design discussions in the dev mailing list, and replying to other users questions
  • We have setup our build in Gump
  • Xavier will give a talk at ApacheCon EU

Code aspects:

  • The refactoring to help new developers to catch up with the code base is mostly finished.
  • We are currently preparing a first release, the release process is documented, and we are almost ready to submit the release to the vote of the IPMC
  • We have greatly improved our compatibility with Apache Maven 2 metadata
  • Some changes to make Ivy more simple to use and more flexible are still in development

JuiCE

Lucene.Net

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

Lucene.Net has had a rough time learning the ropes of the Apache Incubator, struggling with making releases that dot all the i's. There are several hurdles, with a single committer (George Aroush) using a language/platform that is not commonly used at the ASF and which has a culture that has historically not been about open source (C# .NET). Goerge has put forth additional effort recently to address the concerns that the Incubator PMC mentioned, and is on its way to a new release.

iPMC questions / comments:

  • jukka: Incubating since 2006-03-15

NMaven

Qpid

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

The Apache Qpid Project provides an open and interoperable, multiple language implementations of the Advanced Messaged Queuing Protocol (AMQP) specification

Date of entry to the Incubator : 2006-09

Resolved issues

  • None to report

Top two items to resolve before graduation

  • Understanding the details between JCP and announce compliance
  • Making sure we are comfortable with the working relationship between Qpid and the AMQP Working Group.
  • Any legal, cross-project or personal issues that still need to be addressed?
  • We need another Mentor, it has become clear that a project can't function smoothly without at least 3 Mentors, looking for another mentor.... This has delayed getting new committers onto the project, as most of the committers we are attracting are net new to Apache and the long cycles to get them on due to IPMC votes etc does not create a great impression for Apache new comers.
  • Latest developments.
  • Since entering into incubation we have had one release of the java code base (M1).
  • We have migrated our build system from ant to maven.
  • Development has been moving forward. with improvements in memory footprint management, passing the JMS TCK in with the java broker.
  • Addition of .NET client
  • Contributions from new non committers
  • Successfully voted to give 3 new committers access rights
  • Successfully voted to give a new member contributor rights to cwiki.
  • The creation of Web site
  • General progress on all code bases
  • In progress voting on 3 more new committers
  • Definition of test suite
  • Merge in branches relating to next spec version (C++, Python - Java in progress)
  • Plans and expectations for the next period?
  • Release a M2 of the full project
  • Merge in branches relating to next spec version 0-10
  • Move trunk to 0-10 of AMQP specification
  • Imporoving tests and coverage
  • Close question on JCP.

iPMC questions / comments:

Tika

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin

Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries. Tika entered incubation on March 22nd, 2007.

The Tika project has just started. The basic infrastructure (mailing lists, subversion, issue tracker, web site) is mostly in place; the only thing still missing is one committer account. We expect to get started with the actual design and code work during the next few weeks.

TripleSoup

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

TripleSoup will be an RDF store, tooling to work with that database, and a REST web interface to talk to that database using SPARQL, implemented as an apache webserver module. TripleSoup entered incubation on February 5, 2007.

There are currently no issues requiring Incubator PMC or board attention.

  • Two out of three initial codebases have arrived.
  • Current work has focussed on the website, test infrastructure and build system.
  • Legal clearance of initial codebases has been all but completed and they're in SVN

UIMA

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

UIMA is a component framework for the analysis of unstructured content such as text, audio and video. UIMA entered incubation on October 3, 2006.

Some recent activity:

  • We completed our first incubating release last month, resolving all legal issues and obtaining the necessary Incubator PMC approval.
  • We also published our first hotfix shortly afterwards, addressing an issue in our GUI tooling found by our users.

Items to complete before graduation:

  • Attract new committers

Community:

  • Traffic on the uima-user list has started to pick up since our release. We hope to be able to eventually attract some Apache UIMA users to become committers.
  • uima-dev list has a good amount of traffic, mostly from the original committers.
  • We have one contributor, Jörn Kottman who has submitted a few patches.

Code:

  • The UIMA Java framework code has been released
  • The UIMA C++ framework code was donated with a software grant and has been added to SVN. We're currently doing the final migration and testing work to enable a release of the C++ framework.
  • We've established a sandbox and accepted a contribution from Jörn Kottman
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