Re: [DRAFT1] Jakarta Newsletter - August 2002

[robert burrell donkin <ro...@blueyonder.co.uk>]

(here's some bits and pieces from the commons.)

Jakarta Commons
===============

The major subject for debate this month was the organization of the 
mailing lists (again):

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=104376872026090&w=2

Jexl
----

Jexl was promoted from the Sandbox to the Commons this month.

Jexl is a java expression language designed for easy embedding in 
applications and frameworks. It is an extension of the Expression Language 
of the JSTL (JSP Standard Tag Library). The motivation was to bring some 
of lessons learned by the Jakarta Velocity community about expression 
languages in templating to a wider audience.

Those people familiar with Jelly will recognize this as the expression 
language used by Jelly.

BeanUtils
---------

Finally the promised 1.6 release!

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=104319227016196&w=2

This fixes a lot of bugs and rolls up the extra features add over the last 
few months. Unfortunately, some changes in this release effected some code 
used in maven and jelly. So expect a 1.6.1 release very soon.

Digester
--------

The long awaited Digester 1.4 was released this month.

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=104430587104335&w=2

This fixes several bugs but also has some important changes to the Rule 
interface that allow more sophisticated namespace-aware rules.

Betwixt
-------

At last betwixt has a release - but it's only an alpha. There a lot o 
features on the to do list but first must come some internal refactoring. 
So, this is an alpha release since the internal API may need to change but 
hopefully the disruption to most users can be kept to a minimum.

On a more light hearted note, it appears that betwixt now has some more 
competition:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=104369586610737&w=2

Jelly
-----

Another busy month!

Jelly has been successfully split into tag libraries and core:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=104296001908752&w=2

Release issues have been resolved one by one:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=104353140304195&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=104335501905419
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=104153070819002&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=104101557728040&w=2

It's a long road but the end is now in sight.


On Tuesday, September 3, 2002, at 12:44 PM, Rob Oxspring wrote:

> Jakarta Newsletter
> ==================
> Issue: 3
> Date: August 2002
> Url: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/news/200208.html
>
> The third issue of the newsletter is upon us so lets have a look at what'
> s been happening; I've been given an apache account and so
> have been starting to beef up the newsletter archive page http://jakarta.
> apache.org/site/news/, hopefully I'll get around to a front
> page link soon to publicise this better. The Ant team have been resting 
> themselves after a heavy couple of months, meanwhile the
> guys at Avalon have been writing C# code and the ObjectRelationalBridge 
> developers have been tackling some bugs and features.
>
> Once again I want to thank those who contributed and hope that you enjoy 
> the read. If you would like to comment further on any of
> the highlighted discussions then please do so on the appropriate list, if 
> you want to comment on the newsletter itself then please
> point your comments to general@jakarta.apache.org.
>
> Rob Oxspring
>
> Contents
> --------
> General
> Ant
> Avalon
> Commons
> Lucene
> ObJectRelationalBridge
>
>
>
> General
> =======
> "Ideas, suggestions, and comments on the overall Jakarta project"
> Editor: Rob Oxspring
>
> The Gname effect was discussed at length thanks to a misdirected news 
> posting from George Hester. The news <-> mail gateway is
> enabling people to discover and use the Jakarta mailing lists without 
> having to look at the mailing lists guidelines [1]. A couple
> of solutions were offered namely adding usage information to the list's 
> tagline, and blacklisting the gateways but no real
> conclusion was drawn [2].
>
> Thanks to a couple of enterprising Japanese guys, a Japanese language 
> version of the jakarta site is taking shape [3,4] and there
> was also some talk of how best to internationalise the site [5].
>
> Sun's Scott McNealy expressed some controversial opinions about the open 
> source approach. Sparks flew[6].
>
> Can jakarta have members who are not linked to a particular subproject? 
> Is the Jakarta-Site cvs module a subproject? should it be?
> and should it have different voting rights to the other subprojects? All 
> these questions and more were posed and discussed with few
> conclusive answers forthcoming, see what you think [7].
>
> [1] - http://jakarta.apache.org/site/mail.html
> [2] - 
> http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta.
> apache.org&from=210121&to=210121&count=27&by=thread
> [3] - http://www.ingrid.org/jajakarta/index.html
> [4] - 
> http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta.
> apache.org&by=thread&from=219451
> [5] - 
> http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta.
> apache.org&by=thread&from=218247
> [6] -
> http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/SearchList?listId=&listName=general@
> jakarta.apache.org&searchText=Sun+saids+Opensource+is+bad&d
> efaultField=subject&Search=Search
> [7] - 
> http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta.
> apache.org&by=thread&from=213038
>
>
>
> Ant
> ===
> "Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool"
> Editor:Stephane Bailliez
>
> A quiet month in terms of discussions and code. It has mostly been bug 
> fixes pushing slowly toward a new release sometime soonish.
>
> Most of the developpers have stepped aside a little bit to enjoy some 
> well deserved vacation and reacquaint with friends and family.
>
> In particular Stefan Bodewig managed to escape the flood in Germany by 
> living in the good side of it and despite being in vacation
> periodically escape his wife and kids to connect and check emails and cvs 
> commits, should it be for fixing the copyright date that I
> keep forgetting to change most of the time.
>
> Erik Hatcher and Steve Loughran slowly decompress from the rush about 
> their book 'Java Development with Ant' that they managed to
> deliver in time and synchronized with Ant 1.5 (despite all attempts of 
> other committers to make changes until the last minute).
>
> Magesh Umasankar after successfully being release manager for Ant 1.5 
> applies the same rigorous process for the 1.5.1 release.
>
> Diane Holt keeps doing a tremendous job in ant-user by nearly doing a 7/7 
> - 24/24 support. All others committers are way behind.
>
> Last but not least, the Ant team received a query about a Ant purchase 
> order issued from a developer located in Dubai, United Arab
> Emirates. We are still trying to make a quote. Any suggestions is welcome.
>  ;-)
>
>
>
> Avalon
> ======
> "The Avalon project is an effort to create, design, develop and maintain 
> a common framework and set of components for applications
> written using the Java language"
> Editor:Leo Simons
>
> Probably the most exciting thing happening with avalon at the moment is 
> that a port to C# [1] is in the works! Initial concerns
> regarding fitting C# into a java project were quickly satisfied, and the 
> people working on the port were happily welcomed in. Some
> very interesting material [2] is now appearing in CVS...
>
> Some of the discussion on avalon-dev got pretty heated [3] this month. 
> Efforts to improve interoperability between the various
> avalon containers [4] led to long discussions about some of the design 
> choices made [5]. We are still confident this is all for the
> better in the end, though. We hope to make it possible to share 
> components between cocoon, james, turbine, ant, and other projects
> completely transparantly.
>
> Finally, some avalonians are getting pretty exited as the avalon phoenix 
> subproject [6] is getting closer and closer to a final
> release. This will (among other things) help satisfy the requests we have 
> been getting [7] from programmers that are desperately
> trying to convince their bosses that Phoenix is a Good Thing.
>
> Make sure to read the next few newsletters to find out how the avalon 
> developers resolve their container interoperability 'wars' and
> also learn why C# is (or isn't) really cool new technology.
>
> [1] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=avalon-dev&m=102823180701713&w=2
> [2] - http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-avalon-
> excalibur/csframework/
> [3] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=avalon-dev&m=102957399421271&w=2
> [4] - http://jakarta.apache.org/avalon/framework/reference-containers.html
> [5] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102967887900001&r=1&w=2
> [6] - http://jakarta.apache.org/phoenix/
> [7] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=103043406700001&r=1&w=2
>
>
>
> Commons
> =======
> Due to the diverse nature of the commons group, this section has been 
> split up to make it easier to pick out the topics of interest.
> This months stories come from the following:
>
> CLI
>
> CLI
> ---
> "Commons CLI provdes a simple API for working with the command line 
> arguments and options"
> Editor: John Keyes
>
> A new feature has been added so a value separator can be provided. This 
> is to make it easier to process options like
> "-Dproperty=value". When building the Option specify that '=' is the 
> value separator. The Option will have two argument values when
> it is parsed; "property" and "value".
>
> A good deal of refactoring was carried out on the parsers. The individual 
> parsers now implement the flatten() method. All of the
> Option processing is performed in the Parser class.
>
>
>
> Lucene
> ======
> TODO: Grab Otis' contribution from home!!
>
>
>
> ObJectRelationalBridge
> ======================
> "an Object/Relational mapping tool that allows transparent persistence 
> for Java Objects against relational databases"
> Editor:Thomas Mahler
>
> There is a new O'Reilly book about Struts in the works that covers 
> integration of Struts and OJB. It contains a whole chapter on how
> to build a model layer based on OJB (chapter 6). The book is available on 
> the Serverside.com for public review [1]. I had a short
> conversation with the author and he posted an inspiring reply [2].
>
> Several users reported problems when running OJB apps in Tomcat and 
> reloading servlets. There have been some discussions about
> possible workarounds on the user list [3].
>
> Finally we decided to work on this problem and to implement a reload 
> capaple configuration mechanism too. We started on an Avalon
> based implementation [4].
>
> We have been thinking about support for long transactions for a while. We 
> finally came up with a clear vote to implement this
> feature [5]
>
> There has also been a new public release 0.9.5 that containes mostly bug 
> fixes.
>
> [1] - http://www.theserverside.com/resources/strutsreview.jsp
> [2] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=ojb-
> dev@jakarta.apache.org&msgNo=1413
> [3] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=ojb-user@j
> akarta.apache.org&by=thread&from=218099
> [4] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=ojb-
> dev@jakarta.apache.org&by=thread&from=215588
> [5] -
> http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/SearchList?listId=&listName=ojb-dev%40jakarta.
> apache.org&searchText=%22%5Bvote%5D+long+transact
> ions%22&defaultField=subject&Search=Search
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe, e-mail:   <ma...@jakarta.apache.org>
> For additional commands, e-mail: <ma...@jakarta.apache.org>
>


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: general-help@jakarta.apache.org