Board report June - September 2008

Summary
=======
The Apache Harmony project delivered another milestone release containing
Google Summer of Code contributions, bug fixes, and a notified security
fix.  The community is quiet but steady at the moment.  The lack of a JCK
continues to be an issue for Harmony.

Development & Releases
======================
Development continues to be focused primarily on the Java 5 SE code stream
and associated development tooling, with work on the Java 6 SE stream being
limited to core areas of the class library.  Work on the VM, JIT, and GC
has slowed noticeably.

Milestone build 5.0M7 was declared on August 21, 2008.  This milestone
includes a number of fixes and enhancements, as evidenced by over
125 JIRA issues resolved and over 600 commits since our last milestone
published at the start of May.

Noteworthy enhancements include:
  * improved performance, especially in object serialization
    and pack200 decoding.
  * a new 'javap' tool for class file disassembly, and good
    progress on 'policytool' the security policy management tool.
  * lots of fixes in the Swing widget toolkit.

Six Google Summer of Code projects were assigned for mentoring by members
of the Harmony community, but only two of those completed.  We would
particularly like to thank András Belicza (policytool) and Tharindu Mathew
(Swing enhancements) for their contributions to the project!

Security
========
In July, the ASF security group advised the Harmony PMC of a vulnerability
in our code.  The issue is fixed in the milestone 7 release.  The details
of the vulnerability have not been fully publicly disclosed yet.

Community
=========
The community continues to operate in a healthy manner, with a noticeable
quiet period over summer.

We are pleased to see some Harmony code is being used in Sun's performance
release of Java SE 6 (an improved TreeMap), and work done in the
JikesRVM 3.0 project that enables that VM to run Harmony class library code.

There were no changes to committers or PMC membership during this period.
There are currently 38 committers, ~18 of whom were active this period. 

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