Incubator PMC report for November 2014

The Apache Incubator is the entry path into the ASF for projects and codebases
wishing to become part of the Foundation's efforts.

There are 34 podlings under incubation this month. No projects are 
currently voting on graduation. The incubator added HTrace and Taverna
as two new incubating project.

* Community

  New IPMC members:



  People who left the IPMC:



* New Podlings

  Ignite
  Taverna
  HTrace

* Graduations

  The board has motions for the following:

  Drill
  DeviceMap
  Falcon

* Releases

  The following releases were made since the last Incubator report:

  Apache Calcite 0.9.1 (incubating)
  Apache Flink 0.7.0-incubating

* IP Clearance

  FlatSpark for Apache Flex
  Sling Resource Editor contribution

* Legal / Trademarks

  None

* Infrastructure

  None

* Miscellaneous

  HDT is currently discussing retirement.
  ODF Toolkit discussed retirement, ultimately decided to remain active for now.
  NPanday seems to have begun struggling once again. It is likely that IPMC will 
  recommend considering a retirement option.
  Ripple is struggling to build community and recently discussed whether it ought 
  to retire or not. Ross Gardler volunteered to step up as a Ripple mentor and
  report back on the path forward in six months. An additional issue with Ripple's
  Node.js-based artifacts is the lack of clear indication that they are coming
  from an incubating project and NOT a TLP. Ross is looking into fixing that as well.
  Slider's report didn't have a mentor sign off.

-------------------- Summary of podling reports --------------------

* Still getting started at the Incubator

  Ignite
  Taverna
  HTrace

* Not yet ready to graduate

  No release:

  REEF
  Droids

  Community growth:

  BatchEE
  Flink
  Sirona
  Slider
  Twill


* Ready to graduate

  Blur

  The Board has motions for the following:

  Drill

* Considering retirement or other alternatives to graduation

  Hadoop Development Tools
  ODF Toolkit

* Did not report, expected next month

  NPanday
  Ripple

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                       Table of Contents
BatchEE
Blur
Droids
Flink
Hadoop Development Tools
Ignite
ODF Toolkit
REEF
Ripple
Sirona
Twill

----------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------
BatchEE

BatchEE projects aims to provide a JBatch implementation (aka JSR352) and a
set of useful extensions for this specification.

BatchEE has been incubating since 2013-10-03.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

  1. Increase the community
  2. Improve our documentation

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

 No, activity is somewhat low recently, but that is due most of the 
 involved people are also active in other ASF projects which needed
 some attention lately.


How has the community developed since the last report?
We got a few patches from both IBMers and 'new' community members.


How has the project developed since the last report?
BatchEE already gets used in real world projects. 
It is now also part of Apache TomEE-2.0 which will target
JavaEE-7 as soon as we get the JavaEE TCK. 
Please note that the TCK issue doesn't affect BatchEE as 
the JSR-352 spec and TCK are licensed under ALv2 (txs IBM!).



Date of last release:

  2014-08-09 batchee-0.2-incubating

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?
  during inubation. We got a few contributions though.Signed-off-by:

  [ ](batchee) Jean-Baptiste Onofré
  [ ](batchee) Olivier Lamy
  [X](batchee) Mark Struberg

Shepherd/Mentor notes:

  Did not report on time. May be procedural issue with last release
  (no general@i vote taken) asked on dev mailing list to clarify.

--------------------

Blur

Blur is a search platform capable of searching massive amounts of data
in a cloud computing environment.

Blur has been incubating since 2012-07-24.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

  1. None in terms of Incubator criteria; we are on the verge of a very 
  stable version and would like to get that out the door prior to 
  graduation.

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

The notarized trademark document referred to in past board reports has
now been signed.

How has the community developed since the last report?

  We continue to be small but active.
  - Subscriptions: user@ - 60[-1]; dev@ - 66[-1]

How has the project developed since the last report?

We have two main efforts going on over the past quarter: 1) we've made
numerous improvements to stabilize the original platform at really
large scale. 2) we've been refining the ideas around the new major
feature - which will introduce a new abstraction in distributed search
- mentioned in our previous report.

We're pleased to have seen some new folks show up and contribute bug
reports and patches.

Date of last release:

  2014-07-29

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

  2014-07-28



Signed-off-by:

  [ ](blur) Doug Cutting
  [X](blur) Patrick Hunt
  [X](blur) Tim Williams

--------------------
Droids

Droids aims to be an intelligent standalone robot framework that allows to
create and extend existing droids (robots).

Droids has been incubating since 2008-10-09.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

  1. Activity
  2. Name Search

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

None. The previous goal of the name search has began. Ant Elder is 
assisting us in the search. 
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PODLINGNAMESEARCH-59

How has the community developed since the last report?

  No change.

How has the project developed since the last report?

  No change.

Date of last release:

  2012-10-15

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

  2012-05-07

Signed-off-by:

  [x](droids) Thorsten Scherler
  [x](droids) Richard Frovarp


--------------------
Flink

Flink is an open source system for expressive, declarative, fast, and
efficient data analysis. Flink combines the scalability and programming
flexibility of distributed MapReduce-like platforms with the efficiency, out-
of-core execution, and query optimization capabilities found in parallel
databases. Flink was originally known as Stratosphere when it entered the
Incubator.

Flink has been incubating since 2014-04-14.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

  1. Community growth


Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

   None

How has the community developed since the last report?

  Two new committers were voted into the project: Márton Balassi and Gyula 
  Fóra. There were presentations on Flink at the VLDB keynote, a meetup in 
  Stockholm (more than 150 participants), one in Pasadena, CA and two
  meetups in Berlin.  There are upcoming talks in Palo Alto, CA and at the
  Apache Con in Budapest. The dev@flink mailing list had more than 300 
  messages on average in the last months. The user@ list 124 in October.

How has the project developed since the last report?

  Flink has released two major versions (0.6-incubating and 0.7-incubating)
  in the last three months. (There was also a minor bugfix release for the 
  0.6-incubating release). The Apache MRQL (incubating) project has added 
  support for running programs with Flink. There is an effort within the 
Flink community to integrate with Apache Tez.

Date of last release:

  2014-10-26

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

   2014-09-06


Signed-off-by:

  [ ](flink) Sean Owen
  [x](flink) Ted Dunning
  [ ](flink) Owen O'Malley
  [X](flink) Henry Saputra
  [ ](flink) Ashutosh Chauhan
  [X](flink) Alan Gates

--------------------
Hadoop Development Tools

Eclipse based tools for developing applications on the Hadoop platform

Hadoop Development Tools has been incubating since 2012-11-09.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

  1. Build Community
  2. Get more activity

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

 - The projects lacks activity in all respects, there's currently a
   discussion thread to consider a retirement option

How has the community developed since the last report?

 - Not much activity has happened over the last quarter

How has the project developed since the last report?

 - The project has not made any progress over the last couple of months

Date of last release:

 - August 2014

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

 - November 2013

Signed-off-by:

  [ ](hadoopdevelopmenttools) Suresh Marru
  [ ](hadoopdevelopmenttools) Chris Mattmann
  [X](hadoopdevelopmenttools) Roman Shaposhnik

Shepherd/Mentor notes:

There's talks of retirement on the list.

--------------------
Ignite

A unified In-Memory Data Fabric providing high-performance, distributed in-
memory data management software layer between various data sources and user
applications.

Ignite has been incubating since 2014-10-01.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

  1. Finish migration to Apache process.
  2. Grow active and healthy community around Apache Ignite product.
  3. Get on a stable release schedule and have 3 successful product releases.

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

  None at the moment.

How has the community developed since the last report?

  This is the 1st report for the Ignite project, so the community only has
  all the initial committers.

How has the project developed since the last report?

  - ICLAa are signed for all PPMC members and committers
  - Software grant from of the source code from GridGain to ASF is signed 
  and submitted.
  - PPMC chair is elected – Dmitriy Setrakyan
  - Project bootstrap completed (Jira, GIT, SVN pubsub, Nexus)
  - Initial code import started

Date of last release:

  No releases yet: the code is still in the migration phase

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

  10/01/2014 Initial committers were added.

Signed-off-by:

  [X](ignite) Branko Čibej
  [X](ignite) Konstantin Boudnik
  [ ](ignite) Henry Saputra
  [X](ignite) Roman Shaposhnik
  [ ](ignite) Michael Stack


--------------------

ODF Toolkit

Java modules that allow programmatic creation, scanning and manipulation of
OpenDocument Format (ISO/IEC 26300 == ODF) documents

ODF Toolkit has been incubating since 2011-08-01.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

1. Grow the community in terms of committers
2. Have regular releases
3. Decide if we would like to be a top level project or join an existing
   project, or move to the attic.

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

  We've been discussing moving the project to the attic. What little
  discussion there has been on this was generally against the idea.
  Disussions are ongoing.

How has the community developed since the last report?

  We have made a release but there has been little activity since then.
  We need to attract more members and publicizing the project in the ODF 
  Plugfest was suggested as a means of doing so.

How has the project developed since the last report?

  There have been some user issues reported and responded to.
  Some new problems reported, no fixes applied yet.

Date of last release:

  2014-06-02

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

  2012-10-29

Signed-off-by:

  [x](odftoolkit) Rob Weir
  [ ](odftoolkit) Sam Ruby
  [x](odftoolkit) Nick Burch
  [ ](odftoolkit) Yegor Kozlov

Shepherd/Mentor notes:

 There were talks on the list about retirement, due to lack of participation.
 It seems to have stirred up some new interest, so we'll need to continue to
 monitor.

--------------------
REEF

REEF (Retainable Evaluator Execution Framework) is a scale-out computing
fabric that eases the development of Big Data applications on top of resource
managers such as Apache YARN and Mesos.

REEF has been incubating since 2014-08-12.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

  1. Update the existing project web site and figure out how to transfer it
   to the ASF infrastructure. (REEF-4)
  2. Update the license-related documentation to be match ASF standards 
   (REEF-16)
  3. Do a first Apache release (after 2)

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?



How has the community developed since the last report?

  * We have received our first contributions via pull requests on GitHub

How has the project developed since the last report?

  * The Microsoft code base has been moved to ASF infrastructure
  * All maven artifacts and java package names have been moved to the 
    org.apache.reef namespace



Date of last release:

  None yet

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

  None yet

Signed-off-by:

  [X](reef) Chris Douglas
  [ ](reef) Chris Mattmann
  [ ](reef) Ross Gardler
  [ ](reef) Owen O'Malley

--------------------

Sirona

Monitoring Solution.

Sirona has been incubating since 2013-10-15.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

  None

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

  None

How has the community developed since the last report?

  Not a lot.

How has the project developed since the last report?

  Development was focused on rewriting the UI to a new technology

Date of last release:

  2014-06-26

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

  None since the start of the incubation process.

Signed-off-by:

  [X](sirona) Olivier Lamy
  [ ](sirona) Henri Gomez
  [ ](sirona) Jean-Baptiste Onofre
  [ ](sirona) Tammo van Lessen
  [ ](sirona) Mark Struberg

--------------------
Slider

Slider is a collection of tools and technologies to package, deploy, and
manage long running applications on Apache Hadoop YARN clusters.

Slider has been incubating since 2014-04-29.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

  1. Increasing community diversity
  2. Completing podling name search
  3. Building a user community

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

No

How has the community developed since the last report?

We have added one committer / PMC member, Gour Saha.

We're getting some independent users/developers on our list, including
some initial contributions and some bug reports. As an example, we
have some contributed patches for command line improvements and bug
reports around user experience improvement.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Development and mailing lists have been active, working towards a
major upcoming release.  A service registry has been redesigned and
contributed to Yarn (see YARN-913), and Slider continues to help
drive improvements needed for long-lived services in Yarn.

The current plan is to release Slider version 0.60 in November.

Thanks to the Accumulo, HBase, and Storm community, application packages
for all the three are now updated to work with Slider 0.60,  Hadoop 2.6,
and secured clusters in general. Moreover, HBase and Storm packages for
Windows are also already developed.

Date of last release:

  2014-07-21

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

  2014-09-22

Signed-off-by:

  [ ](slider) Arun C Murthy
  [ ](slider) Devaraj Das
  [ ](slider) Jean-Baptiste Onofré
  [ ](slider) Mahadev Konar

Shepherd/Mentor notes:



--------------------
Taverna

Taverna is a domain-independent suite of tools used to design and execute 
data-driven workflows.

Taverna has been incubating since 2014-10-20.

The podling is currently working through the bootstrap process.

Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:

  1. Bootstrap at ASF.
  2. Build community.
  3. Migrate large existing codebase and processes.

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

None.

How has the community developed since the last report?

(First report)
* Mailing lists are setup.
* Currently, getting CLAs on file and accounts created.


How has the project developed since the last report?

(First report)


Date of last release:

  None so far.

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

  Initial committers.

Signed-off-by:

  [X](taverna) Andy Seaborne
  [ ](taverna) Chris Mattmann
  [ ](taverna) Suresh Srinivas
  [ ](taverna) Suresh Marru
  [ ](taverna) Marlon Pierce


--------------------

Twill

Twill is an abstraction over Apache Hadoop YARN that reduces the complexity of
developing distributed applications, allowing developers to focus more on
their business logic

Twill has been incubating since 2013-11-14.

Top three items to resolve before graduation:

  1. More committers from different organizations.
  2. Regular releases.
  3. Increase adoption.

Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?

  - None at this time.

How has the community developed since the last report?

  - 8 new JIRA issues filed since last report (2014-08-01)
  - 7 JIRA issues resolved since last report (2014-08-01)
  - Subscribers to the dev list up from 52 in August to 58 in November.
  - the project voted on and adopted a logo
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TWILL-102)

How has the project developed since the last report?

  - Version 0.4.0-incubating RC3 being voted upon

Date of last release:

  - 2014-08-20: 0.3.0-incubating

What are the plans for the next period?

  - Encourage contributions from active users
  - Identify potential committers
  - Improve documentation and website

When were the last committers or PMC members elected?

  - No new committers since incubation.

Signed-off-by:

  [ ](twill) Arun C Murthy
  [ ](twill) Tom White
  [X](twill) Patrick Hunt
  [ ](twill) Andrei Savu

Shepherd/Mentor notes:
  I see normal activity on the dev@ mailing list. At least on mentor is 
  active on the dev@ list.