November 2009 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).

These reports were due here by Wednesday, 11 November 2009

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:

  • 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.
  • The Signed off by mentor: is for Mentor(s) to show that the Report has been reviewed.

Aries

Aries will deliver a set of pluggable Java components enabling an enterprise OSGi application programming model.

Aries entered incubation on September 22, 2009. This is our second board report.

There are currently no issues requiring IPMC or Board attention .

The svn area has been organized with a single trunk for now, though we still need to settle the discussion about components lifecycle and the svn layout.

The application manifest component of the IBM contribution has been moved out into the trunk. The blueprint component has undergone some further enhancement and work is starting on an implementation of the OSGi JMX specification.

The mailing lists was quieter this month, probably due to the apache conference.

Top 2 or 3 things to resolve before graduation:

  • Build community
  • Create a release
  • Address project scope concerns raised during acceptance vote

Signed off by mentor: Kevan Miller / Davanum Srinivas

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.

What we've completed in the last month:

  • API documents has been generated and committed to svn repos;
  • Kevin volunteered as release manager and we are learning the last steps of a release;
  • Announced checklist of third-party library and checklist of release documents in dev-mailing list;

top 2 or 3 to resolve prior to graduation:

  • After last round of checking release documents and release source code package;
  • Start a release vote in dev mailing list first and then vote in general mailing list;

Signed off by mentor:

IPMC comments:

  • Jukka Zitting: I note that almost all of the recent commits have been pretty big. Smaller and more frequent commits are generally better for collaboration. In general it looks like the project is again on a good track, though I'd add community development as a third top issue before graduation.

Droids

Droids is an Incubator project arrived from Apache Labs. Droids entered incubation on October, 2008.

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

What we've completed in the last month:

  • API documents has been generated and committed to svn repos;
  • new committer elected Javier Puerto;
  • Grant Ingersoll resigned for mentoring the project and Thorsten Scherler steps up to fill the position;
  • talking about a release;
  • more people sending patches;

Issues before graduation :

  • Grow community

Signed off by mentor:

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
  • Luciano Resende is now a Mentor of Apache PhotArk
  • PhotArk M1 was released in Sept/27/2009.
  • We started seeing couple people showing interest in the community, a student using the project for a class assignment, and a new contributor has expressed some ideas that he wants to contribute and also started to provide patch.

Signed off by: lresende

Pivot

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

Pivot 1.3 was released in September. This was a major feature release and included a number of new features, bug fixes, and other enhancements.

A new Pivot tutorial highlighting a number of features included in Pivot 1.3 was published on IBM developerWorks:

The team is actively working on version 1.4. Pivot 1.4 is primarily a documentation and bug fix release, though some new features will also be included.

Top 3 issues prior to graduation:

The Incubator PMC voted on a graduation proposal in September. The proposal technically passed, but only by a very slim margin. As a result, Pivot PPMC elected to cancel the vote and focus on the issues raised by those who voted -1, in hopes that a more unanimous approval might be obtained later.

The primary concern was that the project had not yet established sufficient community and was still largely driven by two of the initial committers. Since that time, there has been a significant increase in activity from the other committers, and the project has received several patches from outside contributors. One such patch, an improvement to table column resizing, was committed to the platform. The developer responsible for the patch demonstrated very strong knowledge of the platform and would be considered for addition as a committer should the quality of his code submissions continue to be high.

The team hopes to present a renewed graduation proposal early next year, to coincide with the release of Pivot 1.4.

Signed off by mentor: Niclas Hedhman

IPMC comments:

  • Jukka Zitting: Sign-off from me too. I've been watching Pivot since the first graduation vote attempt, and can confirm the positive development since then. +1 to a new graduation proposal as soon as the community feels ready to do it.

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 August, the Stonehenge project has been making progress towards, and clarifying the scope of an M2 release with improvements to the first sample application centered on both a unified configuration system, and a claims-based security model. As part of the efforts towards an M2 release, a Sun Metro based implementation of the StockTrader sample was added to the trunk.

Community

Since the last report, about 2 new developers have joined and actively contributed code in the form bug fixes and new functionality, as well as documentation. Apache Stonehenge was demonstrated at the NYC .NET Developers Group, the NYC Connected Systems User Group, ApacheCon, and Microsoft's PDC 2009.

M2

Progress has been steady towards an M2 release. There is on-going work on a claims-based security system that adds a passive and active STS in select implementations of the StockTrader sample application. Interoperability testing is currently underway on this new functionality. As documentation is a key part to this project we've completely revampted out CWiki site to accommodate future samples. Currently there are 19 open JIRA issues marked as M2.

M3

As mentioned in the August 2009 Report M3 would consist of either adding more interoperability features to StockTrader or implementing new sample applications. The latter is currently the focus, and the community is focusing on creating "micro samples" for many common WS-* scenarios, with the goal being around creating implementations with low barriers to entry. Discussions are in progress about testing frameworks and scenarios of interest.

Graduation Map

  • Grow community around new claims based stocktrader implementations just added
  • More thorough documentation that empowers developers to replicate interoperability scenarios demonstrated
  • Demonstrate full interoperability between existing components, and release

Signed off by mentor:

Subversion

Subversion entered the Incubator on November 7, 2009.

Discussions have been occurring on general@incubator with respect to graduation requirements, and some options for the podling's mailing lists and location in the main ASF Subversion repository. In addition, a number of discussions have been occurring on Subversion's developer mailing list ( dev@subversion.tigris.org ) regarding the mailing lists (migration, shut down, target address, etc), repository choices and location, which bug tracker to use, website migration, and the buildbot system(s).

INFRA-2321 has been opened to track the code migration, and is scheduled for the afternoon (EST) of Sunday, November 15th.

INFRA-2324 has been opened to construct the core five mailing lists for the Subversion podling: dev@, users@, commits@, private@, and announce@. These mailing lists will be built on the subversion.apache.org hostname. While this is non-standard for a podling, discussion on general@incubator has raised no issues with it. We will later backfill archives for these lists with the content from their equivalents on subversion.tigris.org.

The software grant from Subversion Corporation was filed in ASF records on November 14.

Many Subversion developers have been sending ICLAs into the ASF. An initial batch of *eighteen* account requests has been sent to root. There are fifteen(warning) Subversion committers who already had accounts at the ASF, and they will simply be added to the authorization file for the Subversion repository.

The project has an initial status file in place, and its checklist items are being worked through. The podling is hoping that it can complete its work in time to place a TLP resolution on the December Board meeting's agenda.

Signed off by mentor: Greg Stein, Daniel Rall, Sander Striker

VCL

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

Community Involvement

  • The Apache VCL community is growing and people from several organizations are contributing
  • Questions about administration and end user use of Apache VCL are being asked and answered on the project's vcl-dev and vcl-user lists
  • A growing number of community members from multiple organizations are answering questions
  • Collaboration is occurring for architectural design and release planning via the vcl-dev list
  • Code patches have been discussed on the vcl-dev list and submitted to the Jira issue tracking system

Release Preparation - Apache VCL 2.1

  • The community is working to complete the final administrative tasks required to issue the first release (Apache VCL 2.1)
  • Josh Thompson has volunteered to act as the release manager for 2.1 per the advice of Matt Hogstrom, one of the project mentors
  • PGP keys have been created and added to the distribution area
  • A release candidate artifact has been created and is currently being discussed
  • Code and documentation updates are being made to the release candidate per community consensus
  • The tasks required to complete the release are being discussed on the vcl-dev list
  • Jira is being used to track the release tasks and to assemble the release changelog
  • Release procedures are being documented as the community develops its release process

3rd Party Dependencies

  • Procedures for handling 3rd party dependencies are being worked out by the VCL community with help from the ASF legal-discuss list
  • Major components of VCL are written in Perl and the Apache VCL release will only contain Perl code developed by the ASF
  • A Perl interpreter and supplemental Perl modules are required. These are licensed under the Artistic License, GPL, and LGPL.
  • Concerns were brought up by the project mentors and a question was posed to the legal-discuss list. The question was answered and we are working on implementing the recommendation.

Project Name

  • The Apache VCL project name issue has been resolved
  • NCSU has taken steps to clearly indicate on its Apache VCL instance website that Apache VCL is developed by the ASF
  • References to NCSU have been removed from the code
  • NCSU employees affiliated with the Apache VCL project routinely communicate that VCL is an ASF project and encourage colleagues of other organizations to do the same

Documentation

  • A large amount of documentation has been added to the project's Confluence site
  • People from multiple organizations have contributed to improving the documentation, both by editing the pages themselves and by pointing out areas for improvement on the lists

Unresolved Issues

  • As noted in the May 2009 report -- questions were asked of the mentors regarding the rules governing wiki contributions from individuals who have not signed the CLA. It is the community's understanding that a separate wiki will be needed -- one for official documentation included with releases and one containing contributions from individual who have not signed the CLA. A request has been made to one of the mentors who had offered to create a 2nd wiki instance. This has not been completed yet.
  • A request has been made to the mentors to create a Confluence committers group that contains the Apache VCL community members with a CLA on file
  • A request has been made to the mentors to create a Jira Committers role that contains the Apache VCL community members with a CLA on file
  • Some committers have lost administrative access to Jira. The project mentors have been asked to restore the permissions.

Top Issues Before Graduation

  • Complete the release of Apache VCL 2.1
  • Continue to increase contributors from multiple institutions

Signed off by mentor: Alan Cabrera, Kevan Miller

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 for next reporting period:

  • Remove GPL dependencies
  • First Apache release

Items to be resolved before graduation:

  • Create a release
  • Develop community

Signed off by: lresende, ate

Wink

Apache Wink is a project that enables development and consumption of REST style web services. The core server runtime is based on the JAX-RS (JSR 311) standard. The project also introduces a client runtime which can leverage certain components of the server-side runtime. Apache Wink will deliver component technology that can be easily integrated into a variety of environments.

Apache Wink has been incubating since 2009-05-27.

Notable Activity:

  • Added Mike Rheinheimer as a committer
  • Voted and approved a 1.0 release with bug fixes and API stabilization.
  • Created a migration document from Apache Abdera to Apache Wink for Feeds support.

Planned Activity:

  • More updates to documentation on cwiki
  • Updates to comply with JAX-RS 1.1

Top issues before graduation:

  • Looking into how to interact with other communities
  • Build community

Signed off by: Kevan Miller

WSRP4J

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 graduate as a sub-project of Apache Portals.

Activity: * There is no project activity to report since the last report of August 2009. * The IPR issue has been reviewed by the Legal Affairs Committee and formally stated to be OK with WSRP4J releasing and graduating.

  • Many thanks to Niclas Hedhman for helping out enormously with this!
  • The project now hopefully will get back into action and start cleaning up the codebase, removing/replacing incompatible licensed dependencies (Hibernate) and working towards a first release. * Still standing issue from last report: The current mentors haven't been interactive in a very long time, maybe other/new mentors might be interested to step up?

Signed off by mentor: taylor

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