January 2008 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).

These reports are due to the Incubator PMC by 9 January 2008

Buildr

Description - Buildr is a build system for Java applications written in Ruby.

Date of Entry - Nov. 2007

  • Development

We're working toward Buildr 1.3 which will hopefully become our first Apache release. The main focus of this release is multi-language support with the big addition of Scala. It also opens the door for other languages. The work done around JRuby is also coming to fruition with, for example, the possibility of writing tests with RSpec to run against your Java classes.

  • Community

A very steady stream of patches is coming from a steadily increasing community of users. We've had contributions for EAR support, JRuby, fixes around IDE tasks, ... We're monitoring closely the advanced users that submit patches consistently, to see if we can attract a few of them to become committers.

  • Issues before graduation

When 1.3 is ready, we'll have to face all the issues surrounding the release of Ruby code. Hopefully, when all these issues have been ironed out, our main problems will be solved. From then it's business as usual: continuing to build a healthy community around Buildr.

CXF

Project Name - Apache CXF

Description - SOA enabling framework, web services toolkit

Date of Entry - August 2006

Items to resolve before graduation:

  • Finalize/cleanup the PPMC and committer list to reflect actual participation. We'll be starting those discussions and stuff shortly with hopes to start graduation discussions shortly there after. Dan Kulp had a "face to face" chat with Jim Jagielski at ApacheCon about how to proceed with this.

Community aspects:

  • Worked with Geronimo and Yoko projects to break Yoko into parts bringing the webservices stuff into CXF. Initial bits of code have been "svn cp" into CXF.
  • Started discussions with Dain (and OpenEJB) about adding soap encoding and JAX-RPC support into CXF. Work on that has started with contributions from Dain.
  • Lots of traffic on the cxf-user list. That's a good thing. Some of them are digging into CXF code and submitting patches and suggestions. That's an even better thing. We need to find ways to get more of that.

Code aspects:

  • Released 2.0.3-incubator fixing over 70 issues found by users.
  • Preparing 2.0.4-incubator to be released soon fixing another 50+ issues.
  • 2.1 work is progressing well.

UIMA

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:

  • Version 2.2.1 was released 12/2008, our third incubator release. We were the first ones to follow the new incubator guidelines for distributing from w.a.o/dist/incubator/{podling}. As part of this release, we also changed our download pages to use the Apache mirroring mechanisms. Robert Burrell Donkin was extremely helpful to us in this process, joining our dev mailing list and being very responsive - Thanks Robert!.
  • A member of the team attended ApacheCon 2007 US and presented UIMA in the "fast track" incubator presentations. Included in that presentation, which is available on this wiki, are slides describing UIMA use in several projects, and its adoption by several commercial companies.
  • A software grant for UIMA-EE, an extension to UIMA that uses JMS and Apache ActiveMQ to enable additional, more flexible scaleout capabilities, was submitted to the ASF, and has recently been received. Temis, a commercial company using UIMA, has expressed interest in joining the development work around this new capability, and we welcome their participation.
  • The Cas Editor is now ready for its first release inside the UIMA project, some short test which roughly followed the test plan were successful. The release should be out this month.

Items to complete before graduation:

  • We still need to attract more new committers. We're trying to spark even more activity in the sandbox to get people to contribute.

Community:

  • We continue to do outreach to attract new contributors, which may become committers. The donation of UIMA-EE is facilitating this.
  • There's a good amount of traffic on both the dev and user list.

RCF

RCF is a rich component set for JSF which supports AJAX. We are in the process of analyzing and removing undesired dependencies of our code to be compliant in the OpenSource world.

Tika

Tika (http://incubator.apache.org/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 previous report to the board can be found at http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/October2007.

Community:

No new committers since the last report, activity has been moderate but steady, leading to the 0.1 release.

Development:

Tika 0.1 (incubating) has just been released.

Chris Mattmann intends to use that release in Nutch, That's good progress towards Tika's goal of providing data extraction functionality to other projects.

A new Tika logo was created by Google Highly Open Participation student, hasn't been integrated yet.

Issues before graduation:

Now that the first release is out, we need to work on growing the community and figuring out how to best interact with external parser projects.

Yoko

Yoko (CORBA implementation) has been dissolved, with parts going Geronimo and CXF.

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