February 2008 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).

These reports are due to the Incubator PMC by 13 February 2008


Abdera

Abdera is an implementation of the Atom Syndication Format and Atom Publishing Protocol standards.

The Abdera project is preparing release 0.4.0 which includes many new features and improvements including a new StreamWriter interface and a complete refactoring of the Atompub server APIs. The community has continued to grow with patches for bugs and improvements being actively submitted by members of the user community. Once the 0.4.0 release it out the door, the Abdera PMC will likely begin working towards graduation.

Lokahi

Lokahi is a configuration and management console for Apache httpd, tomcat and other web server infrastructure.

Incubating since: 2006-01-07

Testing on the MySQL port is continuing. A Fast Feather presentation on Lokahi was given at Apachecon in Atlanta. Recently talk (and some code) has begun around templating of configuration files, specifically for Apache Httpd at this time. And the need to extend Lokahi to manage Geronimo has been mentioned.

Obstacles to graduation:

  • community - now includes authors outside of the original dev community, but additional committers are sought.
  • licensing - oracle-only back end is now 95% of the way to an alternate MySQL backend, and soon to be enhanced with license agnostic interfaces

NMaven

NMaven develops plugins and integration for Maven to make building and using .NET languages a first-class citizen in Maven.

Incubating since: 2006-11-17

Items to resolve before graduation

  • More active committer involvement. We have two active committers from different organizations but need at least one more.

Status:

  • We are currently voting on our first release.
  • We have brought NMaven fully in line with Maven architecture. This took a major rewrite of the code.
  • Steady increase of mailing list subscribers over this period (from 35 to 43).

Plans:

  • We lost a lot of features when we rewrote the code so the plan is to start reimplementing these features.
  • Proceed with frequent release cycle

PDFBox

PDFBox is an open source Java PDF library for working with PDF documents. PDFBox entered incubation on February 7th, 2008.

The PDFBox project has just entered incubation, and we're currently setting up the project infrastructure. A question about the licensing of the JAI dependency was voiced on the mailing list.

RAT

RAT is auditing and comprehension for source code and binary releases.

RAT entered incubation in October 2007 but only in the last few weeks started to setup the required infrastructure. Most of this is now in place and the IP clearance for the code import is being worked upon now.

Sling

Sling is a framework to develop content centric web applications based on the idea of modularizing the rendering of HTTP resources.

Sling entered incubation on September 5th, 2007.

Community

  • The Sling PPMC voted and passed the "Community Roles and Processes" document.
  • Paddy Hannon added as Committer and member of the PPMC

Software

  • The Sling API has been finalized and the project migrated to the new API.
  • Creation of the Sling Launchpad, based on the former microsling module, provides a ready to run configuration of Sling.
  • General stabilization of the API and implementation, should lead to a first release soon.
  • No export control notifications are needed for Apache Sling.

Issues before graduation

  • Make an incubating Sling release.
  • Grow a more diverse community (so far commits mostly from Day employees).

Licensing and other issues

  • none

Tuscany

Tuscany simplifies the development, deployment and management of distributed applications built as compositions of service components. These components may be implemented with a range of technologies and connected using a variety of communication protocols. Tuscany implements relevant open standards including, but not limited to, the SCA and SDO standards defined by the OASIS OpenCSA member section.

Incubating since: 2005-11-30

Top issues?

  • Graduation discussion
  • Getting the wiki to handle Chinese characters in order to support Chinese documentation

Community aspects:

  • There has been open discussion about what are the next steps towards graduating Tuscany as a TLP, trying to address concerns raised by the IPMC related to the level of diversity in Tuscany.
  • Voted in Rajini Sivaram as new committer
  • Community involvement continues apace - users are answering mailing list questions, providing patches, and being voted in as committers
  • Users feedback indicates real usage of Tuscany in production environments.

Releases since last report:

  • Java SCA 1.0.1 and Java SCA 1.1 released

Ongoing work:

  • SDO 1.1 is being worked on
  • A Native SCA, SDO and DAS release is slowly being worked on
  • The Java SCA 1.2 release contents are being discussed
  • Links with other Apache projects continue to be forged and lots of exciting new features are being worked on!
  • On going discussion about the JSR235 incubator proposal and having a new podling dedicated to SDO

Woden

On 8th December 2007 Woden graduated from Incubation to a sub-project of Apache Web Services. The results of the IPMC vote were 8 +1s, no 0s, no -1s. This will be the last Woden report to the Incubator. From the Woden team, thankyou to the IPMC for guiding us to the Apache Way.

XAP

XAP is an XML-based declarative framework for creating Ajax applications.

Community

  • There was some movement to make a few more people committers who have been filing numerous bugs and bug fixes, we need to follow up on that.
  • Lack of activity on the mailing lists is a problem; we will have to do better there.

Software

  • I (James M) was onsite at a real customer creating a production deployment. Ran into some bugs and performance issues, especially in IE6, which have been fixed and rolled into the XAP codebase. In particular data centric widgets like tables and comboBoxes should perform better, application startup time is greatly reduced and some stability issues with table were addressed. (No more crashing)
  • We are starting the process of doing another release that incorporates these changes.

Issues before graduation

  • Aforementioned community issues as well as community diversity.
  • No labels