August 2009 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).

These reports were due here by Wednesday, 12 August 2009 so that the Incubator PMC could relay them to the board.

REPORT IS CLOSED

Your project might need to report even if it is not listed below, please check your own reporting schedule or exceptions.

Please remember to include:

"Signed off by:" is for Mentor(s) to show that the Report has been reviewed.
The "incubating since" info
The project's top 2 or 3 things to resolve prior to graduation
A short description of what your project's software does

Bluesky

BlueSky has been incubating since 01-12-2008. It is an e-learning solution designed to help solve the disparity in availability of qualified education between well-developed cities and poorer regions of China.

Summer vacation started from last month, but some members of the team are still working. We've started to replace FFmpeg with Theora and Vorbis which might takes 1-2months. Simultaneously, we would prepare preliminary work of the Release of BlueSky.

Replace FFmpeg and commit.
Prepare to release.

Bill Stoddard (Mentor) comment... we are in the early stages of effectively 'rebooting' the Bluesky project after the recent incident involving sharing of an individuals user id. Inactive members of the community will have their id's revoked and the mentors are considering options for restarting the project with a new set of project committers.

Droids

Droids is an Incubator project arrived from Apache Labs. Droids entered incubation on October, 2009.

It's an intelligent standalone robot framework that allows one to create and extend existing web robots.

Things are charging along in Droids. We have a new committer "Mingfai Ma" with new ideas and another real life usecase. He committed some ideas to the sandbox which are going steady into the core distribution. More people are subscribed lately to the mailing list and we received some patches from different new developers. The patches had been incooperated in our repository already.

Still the focus is on evolving the design and building a larger community.

Signed off by: rgardler

Empire-db

Empire-db is a relational data persistence component that aims to overcome the difficulties, pitfalls and restrictions inherent in traditional Object Relational Management (ORM) approaches. Empire-db is on the Apache Incubator since July 2008.

Recent activities:

Following a rather quiet period in April and May development activities have significantly improved in June and July. The main goal of the development team was to finally complete the release of the Empire-db-2.0.5 release including Maven project management. The new release is now in the staging area and we are currently waiting for our mentors to approve the release, before we move on to get approval of the IPMC.

Community aspects:

Recently code submissions from outside the current development team were received by users from different countries and backgrounds. The submissions are currently under review and are under consideration for an upcoming release. This gives us reasons to believe that the community is growing and demand for Empire-db is rising.

Signed off by: dashorst

Lokahi

The Lokahi project has been retired.

Signed off by: jukka

PDFBox

Apache PDFBox is an open source Java library for working with PDF documents. PDFBox entered incubation on February 7th, 2008.

The PDFBox project continues doing well. Perhaps due to to the summer break, the development activities stuck a little bit, but the community itself is growing.

A problem was detected with the naming of the previously released FontBox and JempBox Maven artifacts. Project mentor Jukka Zitting worked around this issue by copying the existing release artifacts to match the Maven metadata (0.8.0-incubator instead of 0.8.0-incubating). It was noted that even though a new release vote wasn't strictly necessary for such an action, it should have been done only based on community consensus.

After solving most of the remaining blockers found during the license review we will likely soon make a release of the main PDFBox library. PDFBox will soon be ready to graduate from the Incubator.

Issues before graduation:

Closing the last recently resolved legal issues found during the license review
Release PDFBox 0.8.0-incubating
Increase community activity

Signed off by: jukka

PhotArk

Apache PhotArk will be a complete open source photo gallery application including a content repository for the images, a display piece, an access control layer, and upload capabilities.

PhotArk was accepted for Incubation on August 19, 2008.
Issues before graduation :
- Grow community
- Releases
After Roland Weber and Carsten Ziegeler stepped down as a mentor for the PhotArk Podling, the project now have only one mentor left.
The community is very slow going as discussed on general@a.o recently and has not changed since when project entered incubation.
We are working on producing release candidates for our first release which had been evaluated by community members. It is the hope of the current community that having a release will help attract other contributors.
As discussed in general@a.o we are waiting the first release to get out and then re-evaluate the status of the PhotArk project after couple months.

Signed off by: lresende, martinc

Pivot

Pivot is an open-source platform for building rich internet applications in Java. It has been in incubation since January 2009.

Pivot 1.2 was released in June. The team is actively working on version 1.3, tentatively scheduled for release in September. Package names have been changed to org.apache.pivot.* for the forthcoming release. Complete release notes are available in JIRA.
Noel Grandin was added as a PPMC member in July.
A Pivot logo, created by new contributor Thien Luh, was approved by the PPMC.
A new article by developer Greg Brown was posted on Javalobby discussing some of the new features in Pivot 1.3.
Another new article, entitled "Using Apache Pivot to Build an iTunes Search Client" (also by Greg Brown), was submitted to IBM developerWorks and is currently awaiting final publication approval.
Developers Greg Brown and Todd Volkert were interviewed by Michael Cote of Redmonk.
The Auckland JVM Group presented Apache Pivot at their most recent meeting.
Greg and Todd will be presenting Pivot at the next New England Java Users Group meeting in September.

Top 3 issues prior to graduation:

Incubator general mailing list is currently voting on a Pivot graduation proposal submitted by project mentor Niclas Hedhman.

Signed off by: Niclas Hedhman, Martijn Dashorst

SocialSite

SocialSite is a social networking server and a set of gadgets that make it possible to add social networking features to existing web sites. The server is based on Apache Shindig, written in Java and adds a complete persistent social graph (stored via JPA). SocailSite's user interface is an Admin Console and a set of OpenSocial Gadgets that provide a complete social networking interface.

The project has been incubating since April 30, 2009. The SVN space, mailing lists and initial user accounts have been created but we are still waiting for Sun to sign-off on the code grant. It's been about six months since Sun told us this would happen, we've been checking in with Sun every couple of weeks and apparently we're getting close.

Signed off by: Dave Johnson

Stonehenge

Stonehenge has been incubating since December 2008. Stonehenge a set of example applications for Service Oriented Architecture that spans languages and platforms and demonstrates best practices and interoperability by using currently defined W3C OASIS standard protocols.

Since the last report in April, the Stonehenge project has gained tremendous sustained momentum over releasing Milestone 1 (M1) and starting Milestone 2 (M2). The community has gone through many discussions defining and refining features for the .NET StockTrader, Axis2/Java StockTrader, WSF/PHP StockTrader, and the new Glassfish/Metro based StockTrader from SUN. Two of them were demonstrated in the Microsoft Keynote at JavaOne.

A detailed update:

Admin: The community has gone through a release iteration, learning the various Apache guidelines for managing a release. After 3 iterations of review by the incubator-general list, M1 released on June 4th.

Community: About 8 new developers have joined, three of them have been nominated to and granted committer status based on a community vote. Their contributions have been instrumental in advancing M1 and M2. In the last couple of weeks various graduate students from University of Pennsylvania joined the community and are exploring ways to contribute to the Java stacks.

M1: The community has identified and resolved 34 JIRA issues towards the first release. The M1 release was accompanied by detailed documentation allowing any external developer to download and configure the various implementations of the StockTrader application, and demonstrate interoperability between the various platforms. The Stonehenge project was well received at JavaOne and had positive mentions in the press. The Glassfish/Metro based Stocktrader was contributed towards the end of M1. It is currently being moved to trunk in M2.

M2: An extensive discussion ensued about the various security feature and scenarios to implement as an extension for the StockTrader applications. The community identified which features of the various security web services specs implemented by each platform can be used in M2. An overall spec was approved on the list by the respective members of each platform. Currently there are 17 JIRA issues marked as M2.

Graduation map: 1- M1 release: done 2- M2: IN the April report, M2 was described as "Another iteration of improvements for StockTrader would constitute the second release (M2)". M2 now is clearly defined as extending security features in StockTrader, development is well on track for a release in Sept. 3- M3: In the April report, M3 was described as "A third release would be either adding more interop functionality to StockTrader, or implementing a new sample application". M3 is not discussed yet, however with the momentum we have we might prefer to execute it after graduation.

Given the M1 and M2 momentum, we believe we are very close to graduation requirements. The only issues left before graduation is completing M2, along with the needed documentation to demonstrate interoperability between the stacks.

[1] http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/August2009

Signed off by: Abu Obeida Bakhach (AbuB), Paul Fremantle

IPMC comments:

jukka: Note that reaching technical milestones is not relevant to graduation.

Traffic Server

TrafficServer has been incubating since July 13, 2009. The software is an extensible and scalable HTTP proxy and cache, actively used internally at Yahoo!. TS is also well conformed to the HTTP/1.1 specifications, and works very well with the Apache HTTPD server.

The immediate goals for TS are:

Release the source to the Apache SVN server. The Y! developers are actively working on code cleanup, which is the last hurdle before we can push the code out to Incubator.
Build a community.
Make a v1.0 release with the help of the community. This includes fixing whatever breakage the code cleanup has done, improving build system, and packaging.

Recent activities include:

Initial Committers have been given SVN and people.apache.org access.
Mailing lists have been setup, and the champion, mentors and committers are all added to the PPMC list.
The Incubator status page was created (http://incubator.apache.org/projects/trafficserver.html)
A Jira project has been created for Traffic Server.

Signed off by: Doug Cutting

VCL

VCL has been incubating since December 2008. VCL is a framework for cloud management of physical and virtual machines.

The project name has been resolved and there is no legal requirement to rename the project.

Development:

Code development has continued and many commits have been made in preparation for the first release VCL 2.1.

Community:

The VCL community is slowly growing on both the vcl-dev and vcl-user mailing lists.

Top 2-3 goals prior to graduation:

Grow the community
Create one or more releases

Release Preparation:

Almost ready for the first release.
Finalizing the steps in the process.
Perform due diligence on the code base.

Signed off by:

VXQuery

The VXQuery Project implements a standard compliant XML Query processor. It has been in incubation since 2009-07-06.

Completed setup steps:

JIRA/Wiki set up
SVN access for initial committers set up
Initial codebase submitted to SVN
Mailing lists set up
All ICLAs and most CCLAs in place
Incubator status page set up

Immediate goals:

Get all CCLAs in place
Fix mailing list issues
Setup project home page

Top 3 issues before graduation:

Complete podling setup
Build community
Create a release

Signed off by: Paul Fremantle

Wookie

Apache Wookie(Incubating) is a project to create open source software for adding widgets to your applications. It has been in incubation since July 2009.

Items to be resolved
- Complete podling setup
- Create a release
- Develop community
No issues currently require IPMC or Board attention
ICLAs and CCLAs are still being gathered so no code is currently in ASF repositories
Incubation status file requires updating - http://incubator.apache.org/projects/wookie.html
This is our first report. In the last few weeks we have:
- set-up ASF infrastructure
- prepared code for bringing into the ASF
- seen our first JIRA activity from external parties
During the next month we hope to:
- file all CLAs
- move code into ASF
- set up ASF project website

Signed off by: asavory, gmcdonald, lresende, ate

Wink

Signed off by: Kevan Miller

Notable Activity:

The first Wink release was submitted to the IPMC with good feedback from mentors and IPMC members. Issues related to packaging and licensing prevented the board approval of the 0.1 release. Wink committers have addressed issues raised by the IPMC and will re-submit the release candidate to the IPMC once voting is completed in the Wink community.
First new committer added to the project. Jason Dillon was put up for vote and accepted unanimously.
In the process of adding a users mailing list so end users can more easily participate without all of the JIRA and other messages they might not want.

Planned Activity:

Attract more users via more outreach and find out what features they want above and beyond JAX-RS (security related, APIs, etc.)
More updates to documentation on cwiki

Top issues before graduation:

Get releases out
Build community

WSRP4J

[ate, reporting on behalf of Apache Portals PMC as our Chair David Taylor is current on holiday]

The WSRP4J Project is an implementation of WSRP 1.0 Producer. WSRP is an OASIS specification that describes a protocol which allows portlets to be accessed remotely using Web Services.

The WSRP4J Project has been adopted by the Portals PMC, while still in the Apache Incubator, since August 2003 , with the intent to eventually graduate as a sub-project of Apache Portals.

Activity:

There is no activity to report since the last report of June 2009.
Primary task, and foremost reason for the incubation stagnation, is resolving the legal IPR issue with regards to the WSRP spec patent claim from WebCollage, see for further detail the report from June 2009.
Interest to resolve this issue remains high by the Portals project however, but we lack the legal knowledge and experience how to proceed.
The Portals PMC would very much appreciate further help and legal advise in this.
The current mentors haven't been interactive in a very long time, maybe other/new mentors might be interested to step up?