May 2010 Report

Xerces-J

The response for Google Summer of Code this year was amazing. There were at least 6 students who joined the mailing lists to discuss their project ideas and to work with the community on building their proposals, some before we had posted any project ideas for 2010 in JIRA. Due in large part to the increased interest in GSoC, March was the busiest month on the development mailing list (with >180 posts) since April 2004. After the ranking process completed three students (Ishan Jayawardena, Udayanga Wickramasinghe and Sanjaya Liyanage) were selected for XML Schema and XPointer related projects they proposed for Xerces-J. Undoubtedly development activity will increase over the summer with all these new contributors.

We're still working on getting a Xerces-J 2.10.0 release out. At this point it's mostly just a matter of resolving a handful or JIRA issues and writing documentation. Just needs a final push to make it a reality.

Xerces-C++

Xerces-C++ 3.1.1 was released on the 27th of February. This release includes a number of fixes for bugs that were uncovered after the release of 3.1.0 a few months ago. This release also has been tested with and includes project/solution files for Visual Studio 2010 (10.0).

Xerces-P

No activity during the reporting period.

XML Commons

No development activity though some time was spent on cleaning up some old issues in Bugzilla. In particular, we finally got around to responding to the bug report (https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=44426) by the W3C on the excessive number of requests they receive for the same DTDs, XML Schemas and other XML resources. Xerces-J already bundles the XML Commons Resolver and provides documentation on how to use it. While we're sympathetic to the W3C's plight we feel there's nothing more that we can do, since changing the default behaviour (which has been that way for over 10 years) in Xerces-J has the potential to break a large number of existing applications.

General

We have two new PMC members. Mukul Gandhi and Khaled Noaman were added to the PMC at the beginning of May.