July 2007 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).

CLOSED – these reports were due to the Incubator PMC by '11 July 2007_'_

Project graduation continues, with Ode, ServiceMix, STDCXX and QPID looking to receive TLP status now or shortly. We also have new proposals, such as the Java Resource Simulator.

By the same token, we're actively putting projects into a dormant status when they are, in fact, dormant. JuICE is likely the next such project, with the vote is currently pending. On the flip side, we've been asked to bring log4php out of its dormant status, as there is a new community wanting to work on it.

CXF and Tuscany have been doing releases. CXF should probably be starting to push for graduation, too, except for diversity being a concern (Tuscany seems to have the same issue).

Work continues steadily on improving Incubator Documentation. Craig Russell and Robert Burrell Donkin deserve much credit for shepherding the issues.

CXF

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

Project name - Apache CXF

Description - SOA enabling framework, web services toolkit

Date of entry - August, 2006

Top three items to resolve

  1. Diversity - Active commiters are mostly IONA people(and IONA aquiring LogicBlaze didn't help). However, we do have more than three indepentent organizations represented. 2. Growth of community - related to diversity. The traffic on both the users and dev lists is growing with new people jumping in. The 2.0 release has started to generate much more traffic. With a full "none RC" release, we've started getting traffic from people migrating from other products. The CXF community is excited to see this and hope we can rise to the challenge of supporting these new users. 3. Mentor status - recent discussion on general@i.a.o suggested we really need three active mentors. We currently only have 2 active mentors (Jim and James). That said, we successfully released 2.0 and voted in new committers with votes from those two and others on the IPMC. Thanks to the other IPMC folks for taking the time.

Community aspects:

  • Voted in Jeff Genender as a committer due to his excellent work on JAX-WS compliancy fixes.
  • Voted in Tomasz Sztelak from XFire community. He's been contributing to a Maven archetype as well as some docs and other XFire migration things.
  • Released 2.0-incubator
  • Apache Geronimo has been certified J2EE compliant using CXF as their JAX-WS and JWS implementation.
  • A lot of documentation has been added to our Wiki specifically targetting users and people migrating from XFire. We hope this helps attract more users (and thus a create a larger community)

Code aspects:

  • Released 2.0-incubator - this release is JAX-WS Compliant and passed the TCK which was a major milestone for the project.
  • Working on bug fixes for a 2.0.1 hopefully to be released in a few more weeks to address issues found in 2.0.
  • Also planning features for 2.1 including JAX-WS 2.1

iPMC questions / comments:

  • jukka: Please update the status file, otherwise looks fine.
  • jukka: Generally, any good ideas what we could do to help projects in need of more mentors?

FtpServer

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

Project name - Apache FtpServer

Description - Java based FtpServer

Date of entry - March, 2003

Progress since last report

  • Voted in a new commiter, Clint Foster. He is currently in progress of setting up his account and get going with the practical details.
  • Code and documentation improvments has been continously ongoing. Code is mature enough for a milestone release but we're still missing a group of active commiters.
  • Activity on the mailing list has increased, more and more people seems to be using FtpServer.

Top three items to resolve

  1. Growth of community - we need more active commiters. 2. Mentor status - FtpServer mentors are no longer active in the project, we should be looking for new. 3. Getting a build server in place so that we can generate snapshots, they have been requested by several people.

iPMC questions / comments:

  • jukka: Please update the status file. ** Will do
  • jukka: About snapshots, are people asking for continuous nightlies (for testing, etc.) or would a formal release be more appropriate? ** Both are being asked for, due to problem with a formal release (due to low number of commiters) we're aiming for snapshots first
  • jukka: What's the version currently at http://incubator.apache.org/ftpserver/downloads.html? ** A very old one, link has been removed.

Graffito

The Graffito project was retired.

Heraldry

Ivy

iPMC Reviewers: jim

Project name - Ivy

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

Date of entry - October 23rd, 2006

Remaining item to resolve:

  1. Trademark checking - it's still difficult to know if Apache Ivy is a good name according to trademark rules

The top three items to resolve in last report have seen very good progress:

  1. Growth of commiters - We are now 3 commiters from 3 different companies and background 2. Release - We have made our first release approved by the incubator PMC, and are currently preparing a second one 3. Growth of community - The Ivy community is growing, we see more and more contributions in many forms: feedback on the mailing lists, documentation and code patches, articles, ...

Community aspects:

  • Gilles Scokart has join the team of commiters
  • Xavier gave talk at ApacheConEU, which was a good opportunity to discuss with several Apache commiters and members, including especially people from Ant and Maven
  • Ivy is seen in the press more often (see http://wiki.apache.org/ivy/IvyArticles)
  • We have had discussion on our dev mailing list about our road map for upcoming releases
  • Discussion about remaining steps before graduation, one of the last remaining points seems to be trademark checking, which we have started investigating, including by asking questions to the general@i.a.o and legal-discuss@a.o lists.
  • We have agreed on targetting Ant subproject for graduation
  • We have reviewed our site to make it indexable by google (our previous version was making use of a lot of javascript preventing web crawlers to work as expected), checked and fixed all broken links, and isolated site from documentation to be able to provide online documentation history

Code aspects:

  • First release done, a second one is currently in preparation
  • Our development efforts focus on the integration with maven repository, and bug fixing
  • We have agreed to use Sun standard Java coding style, and have started to clean the code base to adhere to this coding style consistent with other Apache projects like Apache Ant

iPMC questions / comments:

  • jim: Maybe engage PRC about trademark question

RCF

iPMC Reviewers: jukka, jim

RCF is a rich component set (ajax-style) for JSF. A JIRA instance has been requested (created INFRA-1291). Also sent mail to root@ to create the accounts of the three RCF committers, that don't have an Apache account yet. Created patch to include RCF on the Incubator page (INCUBATOR-68) and added the first raw version of the status file, of this project (also inside of INCUBATOR-68). We are waiting for an import of a current code drop into the repository.

Incubating since: May 2007

JuiCE

Lucene.Net

iPMC Reviewers: jim

Project name - Lucene.Net

Description - Lucene.Net is a source code, class-per-class, API-per-API and algorithmatic port of the Java Lucene search engine to the C# and .NET platform utilizing Microsoft .NET Framework.

Date of entry - April, 2006

Top item(s) to resolve - Increase the development community and participation. Since the incubation of Lucene.Net, there has been only one active committer, George Aroush, who has done 99% of the port work. This has slowed the port effort such that we are now over 3 months behind with out 2.1 release. Currently, I have tried to re-energies this effort and emphasized that without developers, Lucene.Net will suffer and never graduate. I have gotten several mails offering to help, I will work on those and try to build the development community.

Community aspects - There is a good followers, with good user base. A lot of questions get asked and answered on the user list.

Code aspects - Released version 2.0 "final" on April 2007. Released version 2.1 "alpha" on May 2007

Qpid

iPMC Reviewers: jim

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

Top three items to resolve before graduation

None at present, however the project is going to complete the release of M2 before seeking / evaluating graduation readiness

Resolved:

  1. Understanding the details between JCP and announce compliance...
    Resolution: We don't believe that there is going to be any outcome soon on this issue given the ongoing issues with Apache / JCP. As we pass all the tests in the TCK, the project has concluded to just state that we pass all the tests but not claim compliance until JCP / Apache issues have been resolved.

2. Our STATUS file needs to be updated wrt this report and the addition of our new committers.
Resolution: Done.

3. Making sure we are comfortable with the working relationship between Qpid and the AMQP Working Group.
Resolution: A discussion thread has been had on the Qpid dev list to identify any concerns. Some issues where identified with accessing some of the pages of the Working group, no issues where raised about obtaining information / interacting with the WG. These resources incorrectly posted where highlighted to the working group and have been fixed or are being fixed. We the Qpid project will re-check for concerns on the dev list, and make sure all resources required are accessible by all qpid committers on a periodic basis.

  • Any legal, cross-project or personal issues that still need to be

addressed?

The whole project has not gone through release review and the license files and notices need to be checked for all languages and components.
This is being done as post of M2, and should be complete in the next few days, M2 took longer than expected to close. The following comments thus carried from last board report
<--->

  • Brett: is it 'has now gone through release review', or 'has not' as stated? How was M1 released if license files and notices have not been checked, or has that only been done for Java?
  • Response by Martin(Qpid PPMC): The M1 release only included the Java code base as a result only the license/notice files for Java were checked. The other language variants are being checked to ensure the correct files are in place for when they are ready to release.

<--->

  • Latest developments.
    • Since entering into incubation we have had one release of the java code base (M1).
    • We have stabilized our M2 release, and will be closing that shortly
    • We have migrated our java 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
    • Successfully voted to give 7+ new committers access rights
    • Successfully voted to give a new member contributor rights to cwiki.
    • The creation of the Web site
    • General progress on all code bases
    • Created python test suite
    • Added Ruby language support
  • Plans and expectations for the next period?

During the next period we plan on improving the stability of all language variants. Clustering, DTX, 0-10 AMQP for C++, and 0-8 & 0-10 AMQP client support for Java will most likely be the focus of the next period.

iPMC questions / comments

Tika

iPMC Reviewers: jim

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

Community:

  • The Tika mailing list has seen increased activity in the last weeks, with some new people showing interest for Tika's goals.
  • Grant Ingersoll brought the Aperture framework to our attention (http://aperture.sourceforge.net/), which has similar goals to Tika. We will look at possible synergies.

Development:

  • No code has been committed since our last report, but some initial code is ready in JIRA and should be committed soon.

Issues before graduation:

  • No changes since our last report: the Tika project is still at an early stage of incubation. We need to continue bringing in the initial codebases and probably target for an initial incubating release later this year. We also need to work on growing the community and figuring out how to best interact with external parser projects.

UIMA

iPMC Reviewers: jim

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:

  • Some new features were added to UIMA enabling the framework to support components running with different Java class paths
  • A new release (2.2) is being prepared and should be out within a month
  • The C++ version of the framework is in the final testing stages and should be out within a month

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, but now starting to get some activity from users around the globe.
  • Jörn Kottman continues to work on the tool he contributed, with a fair amount of activity after a few quiet weeks.
  • The Documentation preparation system, based on the Apache Velocity project Docbook system, was considerably upgraded, and now is using Apache FOP 0.93 release for producing printable PDF files.

A workshop on UIMA took place at the GLDV 2007 spring conference in Tübingen/Germany, April 11-13, 2007. It was the first workshop of its kind and drew a large and diverse audience from across Europe. Information about this workshop with links to some of the papers was posted on the Apache UIMA website ( http://incubator.apache.org/uima/gldv07.html ).

An announcement of funding for work on UIMA related projects and activities for University Faculty was announced on the Apache Community mailing list. This announcement drew both some criticism (of the form: is this an appropriate use of that mailing list), as well as support (yes, it is an appropriate use of that mailing list).

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