January 2009 Board reports (see ReportingSchedule).
These reports are due here by 12 January 2009 so that the Incubator PMC can relay them to the board.
THIS REPORT IS NOW CLOSED
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
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.
recent activity:
It is nearly the end of this semester. We were busy preparing and taking exams in the past month. So no further progress could we make. We sent our clean version code our mentor, and are waiting for his reverberation.
Top priority:
- Replacement of FFmpeg. We believe that the clean version of our code should be available under ASL. Thus we are considering the cost of using Theora.
Cassandra
Droids
Droids is a new Incubator project recently arrived from Apache Labs (end October). It's an intelligent standalone robot framework that allows one to create and extend existing web robots.
Things have been quiet this month in Droids. We focus on evolving the design and building a larger community.
PMC Comment: Please include the three (3) items requested by the ASF Board of each report.
Empire-db
Empire-db is a relational data persistence component that aims to overcome the difficulties, pitfalls and restrictions inherent in traditional Object Relational Management (ORM) approaches. Empire-db is on the Apache Incubator since July 2008.
Recent activity:
After the acceptance and publication of the first Apache release in October there has been a discussion going on about what would be the most important improvement for the upcoming release. A suggestion was made to provide a Maven like distribution that will allow to access and build Empire-db with Maven instead of the classic .jar file distribution with Ant build files. While the benefits of this suggestion were soon agreed upon on the developer mailing list, this started a long and verbose discussion on how to go about the issue. Ideas ranged from a basic and slow transition to a Maven big bang.
Since the core development team had no experience with Maven it was also necessary to find someone with the skills to get it right. We were happy to find a community member who was capable and willing to perform this task. After different transition models have been discussed he was given the freedom to decide on the most suitable approach. Since then the Maven transition has been going on in a different SVN branch that is planned to be merged with the trunk for the next release.
Besides that the developers participated in discussions and blogs about relational data persistence on non Apache sites such as www.theserverside.com. An interesting article here http://fromapitosolution.blogspot.com/2008/12/criticism-of-java-persistence.html proves that this is still a hot topic with many who could benefit from Emipre-db.
Plans for the future are:
- Finish the Maven transition and provide a Maven style release
- Provide further documentation and example applications
Community aspects:
For the transition to a Maven style distribution we were happy to find a new committer for our project. Francis De Brabandere who we believe has excellent Maven skills offered his services and was accepted by the current development team and the mentors.
PMC Comment: A good report, but please include ALL three (3) items requested by the ASF Board of each report.
ESME
Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment (ESME) is a secure and highly scalable microsharing and micromessaging platform that allows people to discover and meet one another and get controlled access to other sources of information, all in a business process context.
ESME entered the incubator in 2008-12-02. This report is ESME's first since it joined the incubator and the following items have been performed since its acceptance
- Jira has been established and initial issues have been created
- The Apache Wiki for ESME has been created
- Initial website has been created with Apache Forrest
- ESME Core source code has been partially transfered to the Apache SVN from the Google Code site. This drop is based on the latest version of Scala and includes a more optimal separation of UI and server code to ease customization.
- Accounts for the initial committers have been created (dpp, dhague, vdichev, mrinal)
The following items are planned for the next reporting period:
- Inclusion of other existing svn branches (actions, etc.) from Google Code into Apache SVN trunk
- Submission of Apache CLAs by two or more other team members.
- Next version of Apache Incubator web site with more details
- Collection of feature requests for the next version. Special focus on federation and access rights.
- Transfer of existing issues in Google Code to Apache Jira
- Focus on evolving the design and building a larger community.
PMC Comment: A good report, but please include ALL three (3) items requested by the ASF Board of each report.
Imperius
2009-January Imperius Incubator status report
Imperius has been incubating since November 2007.
Imperius is a rule-based infrastructure management tool.
Web site:
Code: Development continues on the code base.
Community: Not a lot of activity during the holidays. A couple of patches were provided by a contributor which were committed. Discussion about the first release of Imperius is currently under way.
Plans for the future are:
- Add more documentation and example applications
- Work towards the first release
JSecurity
JSecurity is a powerful and flexible open-source Java security framework that cleanly handles authentication, authorization, enterprise session management and cryptography.
JSecurity has been incubating since June 2008.
At the end of November, the JSecurity team released a final external (non-Apache) release: 0.9.0 final. All modifications after the release were made under the assumption that the next release will be an Apache incubating release.
After the November final release, there has been lengthy discussion for the month and half following about JSecurity's name and whether or not it should be changed to something else. 3 mentors voted in favor of chainging the name to something else, 1 voted against, and 1 abstained. Those voting in favor cited concerns of a few external (3rd party) products that might cause a name conflict. Concensus was not reached, resulting in the vote. However, it is considered still an open issue with continued discussion as other IPMC members are contributing to the discussion.
More recently, the team has debated about how the source tree should be configured to allow easy modular builds and to clearly delineate the differnece of JSecurity core versus web support and 3rd party support. The team came to concensus about an initial directory organization and the ant build files were modified to reflect the new structure. It was also discussed that two build systems, both Ant+Ivy and Maven, could be used to build the framework, allowing the one building to choose based on their preference.
Infrastructure migration (noted in our STATUS file) is almost complete - all that needs to be done is migration of the jsecurity.org website into our incubator snapshot. A volunteer is currently in the process of enabling the existing JSecurity theme in the ASF's Confluence export mechanism.
Low-hanging fruit to be cleared hopefully by the next board report is all IP clearance: the Copyright & Licensing and Distribution Rights sections of the STATUS file should be able to be completed in their entirety.
The biggest exit criteria remaining is Team Collaboration. Although the team is satisfying all collaboration directives and has a good community, we need to attract new committers. Hopefully that will be a significant difference in the upcoming months and throughout 2009.
Finally, one of our mentors, Alex Karasulu, had to step down and remove himself as a mentor, citing busy schedules and not enough time to dedicate (http://markmail.org/message/hkh6pjwjlnmtkrjp). We are very grateful for the time he was able to contribute!
The project team is not considering graduation at this point, as the code is not ready for an Apache release. Once IP clearance is complete, we'll attempt our first incubator release.
The status is being maintained in SVN here
JSPWiki
2009 January JSPWiki Incubator status report
JSPWiki has been incubating since September 2007.
JSPWiki is a JSP-based wiki program.
During the past three months, the JSPWiki community has increased somewhat, but the growth seems to level off. The developer list now has 72 names, a modest increase from 66 the last time, and the user list is now 157 people strong, five more than three months ago.
JSPWiki 2.8 (an Apache-licensed version of 2.6) was made successfully, and even a couple of bugfix releases have been done. This means that work on the 3.0 - the first Apache-branded release - is currently strongly underway.
A minor problem was encountered when a widespread bug in Jasper means that we cannot use our initial choice of "org.apache.jspwiki" as the package name without sacrificing compatibility with the majority of servlet containers. The community is still debating a couple of options.
Graduation depends on:
- Renaming org.jspwiki to conform with the org.apache naming scheme
- Making a successful 3.0 release, which is currently being tracked at
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JSPWIKI-461 - Making sure all the legal bits and pieces are in order (i.e. the status file)
Kato
Quiet month with little progress due to vacation period.
- JSR development has started in earnest with group working to define/prioritize major user stories.
- CCLA from IBM is still outstanding. Current expectation is end of month.
Lucene.Net
Lucene.Net has been in incubation since April 2006
Lucene.Net is a source code, class-per-class, API-per-API and algorithmatic port of the Java Lucene search engine to the C# and .NET platform utilizing Microsoft .NET Framework.
Lucene.Net has seen positive activities over the past 3 (or even 6 months), the key highlights are:
- Accepted Isik Yigit (aka: "DIGY") and Doug Sale as new committers, on November 2008.
- Announced Lucene.Net 2.3.1 as beta (via SVN).
- Work is underway on the Lucene.Net 2.3.2 port.
- Work is simultaneously underway on the Lucene.Net 2.4.0 port.
Olio
Olio has been incubating since September 2008.
Olio is a web 2.0 toolkit to help developers evaluate the suitability, functionality and performance of various web technologies by implementing a reasonably complex application in several different technologies.
- Olio is now being run actively by several organizations.
- One user has modified Olio to replace the MySQL database with another.
- There are multiple deployments attempting to scale Olio to test performance
of system infrastructure, software application stack, etc.
- With increased deployment, more bugs are being found and JIRAs filed.
- Work is underway to add a caching tier using memcached.
OpenWebBeans
OpenWebBeans will be an ASL-licensed implementation of the Web Beans Specification which is defined as JSR-299.
OpenWebBeans entered the incubator in October 26, 2008. The following items have been made after the second report
- We have got a new committer who is Mohammad Nour El-Din.
- We implemented introductory sample project to show its usage.
- We come close to finish the first alpha (M1) version.
- We published introductory presentation about the OpenWebBeans.
Belows are the next steps for coming days; - We will release the first alpha version (M1).
- We will implement the remaining parts of the specification.
- We will plan the release date and content of the (M2) version of the project.
- We will create some documentation in the project web site.
- We will continue to attract new committers into the project.
RCF
Sanselan
2009-January Sanselan Incubator status report
Sanselan has been in incubation since September 2007.
Sanselan is a pure-java image library for reading and writing a variety of image formats.
The community hasn't grown much in the past three months. There continues to be only one active committer. Participation level is low.
The first official Apache release occurred on July 30th, 2008. A new release has just been prepared and is current being voted upon.
The new release includes significant bug fixes, better documentation, better IPTC and XMP support (metadata) and improvements to the release structure.
Barriers to graduation continue to be diversity, size of the community, and overall activity.
Stonehenge
Stonehenge has been incubating since December 2008. Since the last report there has been a contribution of code from Microsoft. All nominated committers have submitted CLAs and are now authorized. Apart from that activity has been slow over the holiday period.
Our next steps are to start working towards a first milestone release.
Tashi
Tashi has been incubating since September 2008.
The Tashi project aims to build a software infrastructure for cloud computing on massive internet-scale datasets (what we call Big Data). The idea is to build a cluster management system that enables the Big Data that are stored in a cluster/data center to be accessed, shared, manipulated, and computed on by remote users in a convenient, efficient, and safe manner.
Activity has been slow over the holidays.
The JIRA has been set up and is being used.
Work has begun on integration between the Tashi scheduler and DHCP and DNS servers.
Items to be resolved before graduation:
- Check and make sure that the files that have been donated have been
updated to reflect the new ASF copyright - Check and make sure that all code included with the distribution is
covered by one or more of the approved licenses - Community diversity (currently Intel and CMU committers)
- Demonstrate ability to create Apache releases
Thrift
Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between a variety of programming languages. Thrift entered the Apache Incubator in May 2008.
Recent Activity:
- General iteration and bug-fixing continuing
- Added support for a general type-annotation system added to the grammar – allows for greater flexibility in type modifications
- Significant additions made to some language libraries (i.e. C# has become much more complete)
- Jake Luciani was granted commit rights. He was on the original project proposal, but did not contribute for some 10 months. Therefore, his addition was handled with a PPMC, then an Incubator PMC vote
Issues before Graduation:
- We are still working through adding more committers to the project.
- We are also still developing against the trunk, and will need to create our first Apache release.
UIMA
UIMA is a component framework for the analysis of unstructured content such as text, audio and video. UIMA entered incubation on October 3, 2006.
Some recent activity:
- New Release: Version 2.2.2 (actually the first release) of the C++ version of the UIMA framework, supporting components written in C++.
- Jörn Kottmann added to the IPMC
- Tong Fin and Jerry Cwiklik voted in as committers
- New components voted into the sandbox: a Configurable Feature Extractor and an Apache Tika Annotator
- Many bug fixes and improvements to UIMA-AS (the asynchronous scaleout add-on to base UIMA) driven by experience with users doing extensive scaleout. The fixes address error handling and performance.
Items to complete before graduation:
- We still need to attract more new committers with diverse affiliations.
VCL
Incubator Project - VCL Status for December 2008 - January 2009
Included is the monthly status report for VCL to the Incubator PMC for January 2009
- Community
The community has been active on the vcl-dev mailing list. Some new interested parties have subscribed and open discussion about goals, development processes, etc. have been happening.
There has been some discussion about the use of the project name VCL as NC State is still using this name for their student computing lab. The issue was raised about whether this is acceptable or not. This issue should be resolved before the next board report.
- Source Code
Code has been committed and folks are getting accustomed to the structure and layout of the VCL architecture.
- Miscellaneous
No issues at this time.