Fwd: Incubator April 2007 Board Report

[Matthias Wessendorf <ma...@apache.org>]

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Noel J. Bergman <no...@devtech.com>
Date: Apr 23, 2007 5:13 PM
Subject: Incubator April 2007 Board Report
To: general@incubator.apache.org
Cc: board@apache.org


As noted in the March report, "Heraldry has had issues because of a vendor
deciding that they didn't like having to open up to community development
after all.  Work is underway to reconstitute the project without them.  The
heraldry-dev@ archives document the events and process."  Accordingly, the
Incubator has attempted to restart the Heraldry project with those who have
again agree to operate according to ASF policies and practices.  We don't
know how it will play out, but "be there even just 3 good people wanting to
collaborate" (abuse of literary reference), we will give them a chance.

A number of projects wanted to release during the past month, and that
appears to be going more smoothly now than it has in the past.  I believe
that the expectations are perhaps better known, and it seems that more
projects are running RBD's RAT before asking for a vote.  Tuscany withdrew a
set of votes in order to focus on community issues (some conflict), at least
one new Tuscany Committer has been voted upon since, and about a month later
Tuscany came back with a new request for a release.

Trinidad graduated out of the Incubator to MyFaces.  Another MyFaces-related
project is starting Incubation.

There is something of a shortage of people willing and able to act as
Mentors, even on some of the "larger" projects, much less some of the small
ones, e.g., FtpServer, that are asking for help.  There is no action item
for the Board, just an observation.

On a related note, we once again revisited the issue of who can be a Mentor,
and once again the vast consensus (with a few contrary votes) is that it is
not required that one be an ASF Member, but that it is desirable that at
least one Mentor on every project be an ASF Member, since that means that
the person will have access to archives and information from internal lists
that might be useful in the Mentoring process.

A number of projects failed to report.  They are noted below with a question
if they should be put into an archival status, and e-mail has been sent to
initiate the process.

=== CXF ===

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

Project name - CXF

Description - SOA enabling framework, web services toolkit

Date of entry - August, 2006

Top three items to resolve -
 1. Diversity - Active commiters are still 90% IONA people
 2. Growth of community - related to diversity.  The traffic on both the
users and dev lists is growing with new people jumping in, but still is
mostly IONA folks.
 3. Mentor status - recent discussion on general@i.a.o suggested we really
need three active mentors.   We currently only have 2 mentors total, only
one of which has been active.  (the other is getting back up to speed
though.)


Community aspects:
  * Voted in Jarek Gawor as a committer due to his excellent work on JAX-WS
compliancy fixes.
  * Have been working closely with Geronimo to integrate CXF into the next
version of Geronimo.
  * Have started working with Camel folks to define requirements and produce
API's that allow CXF to work well with Camel


Code aspects:
  * Started to finalize the next milestone release.   There are a few
remaining features we need to finish.
  * Ongoing TCK testing may require unexpected code changes.
  * Very long ongoing discussions about some of the transport API's.
Resolutions on these are slow going.


=== FtpServer ===

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

Description: FtpServer is a Java based implementation of the RFC covering
different aspects of FTP.

Since the last board report, the main activity within FtpServer has been a
rather large rewrite to create an Apache MINA based network implementation.
The aim with this is to leverage the asynchronous IO library to get better
scalability. The initial performance tests shows that this has been
successful and that FtpServer now can handle significant loads. Besides this
major work, many minor issues has been closed, mostly based on feedback from
users.

As reported previously, FtpServer has very few active commiters. Currently,
there is only one. This is, for many reasons a big problem and one that we
need to resolve. A discussion was started on general@i.a.o ton address this.
Among many good ideas, one was to seek closer cooperation with Tomcat and
write a FTP connector for Tomcat. This is something we will pursue both
based on technical (Tomcat is a very stable runtime to base FtpServer on)
and community merits. With this, we hope to possibly attract Tomcat
developers into the joys of FTP.

We also need to reach out using articles, blog posts and talks. No
significant progress has been made in this area since the last report.

iPMC questions / comments:
  * jukka: Incubating since 2003-03-29

=== Graffito ===

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin

Graffito is a framework for content-based applications, especially in
portlet environments. Graffito entered incubation on September 20, 2004.

Despite recent efforts the level of activity within the Graffito project
remains low. The only part of the project that enjoys continued interest and
commit activity is the JCR Mapping component, whose transfer into a
subproject of Apache Jackrabbit is being prepared.

There is little indication that the level of activity within other parts of
the Graffito project would increase in future, so we will most likely
request termination of the project as dormant as soon as the JCR Mapping
component has been moved to Apache Jackrabbit.

=== Heraldry ===

See general report regarding the "reboot" of Heraldry.


=== Ivy ===

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

Project name - Ivy

Description - Ivy is a dependencies management tool mostly used in
combination with Apache Ant

Date of entry - October 23rd, 2006

Top three items to resolve:
 1. Growth of commiters - We are still only two commiters, which is not
enough to ensure the future of Ivy
 2. Release - We haven't made any release in the incubator yet, so we still
don't know if we are able to release.
 3. Growth of community - We have a pretty active user community, seeing
more with more involvement in the project would help.

Community aspects:
  * We have had contributions in patches from 7 contributors since our entry
in the Incubator.
  * Some contributors are actively discussing design discussions in the dev
mailing list, and replying to other users questions
  * We have setup our build in Gump
  * Xavier will give a talk at ApacheCon EU

Code aspects:
  * The refactoring to help new developers to catch up with the code base is
mostly finished.
  * We are currently preparing a first release, the release process is
documented, and we are almost ready to submit the release to the vote of the
IPMC
  * We have greatly improved our compatibility with Apache Maven 2 metadata
  * Some changes to make Ivy more simple to use and more flexible are still
in development

=== JuiCE ===

No report submitted, and it may be time to archive this project.


=== Lucene.Net ===

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

Lucene.Net has had a rough time learning the ropes of the Apache Incubator,
struggling with making releases that dot all the i's.  There are several
hurdles, with a single committer (George Aroush) using a language/platform
that is not commonly used at the ASF and which has a culture that has
historically not been about open source (C# .NET).  Goerge has put forth
additional effort recently to address the concerns that the Incubator PMC
mentioned, and is on its way to a new release.

iPMC questions / comments:
  * jukka: Incubating since 2006-03-15


=== NMaven ===

No report, and it may be time to archive this project.


=== Qpid ===

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

The Apache Qpid Project provides an open and interoperable, multiple
language implementations of the Advanced Messaged Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
specification

Date of entry to the Incubator : 2006-09

Resolved issues

 * None to report

Top two items to resolve before graduation

 * Understanding the details between JCP and announce compliance
 * Making sure we are comfortable with the working relationship between Qpid
and the AMQP Working Group.

* Any legal, cross-project or personal issues that still need to be
addressed?
 * We need another Mentor, it has become clear that a project can't function
smoothly without at least 3 Mentors, looking for another mentor.... This has
delayed getting new committers onto the project, as most of the committers
we are attracting are net new to Apache and the long cycles to get them on
due to IPMC votes etc does not create a great impression for Apache new
comers.

* Latest developments.

 * Since entering into incubation we have had one release of the java code
base (M1).
 * We have migrated our build system from ant to maven.
 * Development has been moving forward. with improvements in memory
footprint management, passing the JMS TCK in with the java broker.
 * Addition of .NET client
 * Contributions from new non committers
 * Successfully voted to give 3 new committers access rights
 * Successfully voted to give a new member contributor rights to cwiki.
 * The creation of Web site
 * General progress on all code bases
 * In progress voting on 3 more new committers
 * Definition of test suite
 * Merge in branches relating to next spec version (C++, Python - Java in
progress)

* Plans and expectations for the next period?

 * Release a M2 of the full project
 * Merge in branches relating to next spec version 0-10
 * Move trunk to 0-10 of AMQP specification
 * Imporoving tests and coverage
 * Close question on JCP.

iPMC questions / comments:


=== Tika ===

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin

Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text
content from various documents using existing parser libraries. Tika entered
incubation on March 22nd, 2007.

The Tika project has just started. The basic infrastructure (mailing lists,
subversion, issue tracker, web site) is mostly in place; the only thing
still missing is one committer account. We expect to get started with the
actual design and code work during the next few weeks.

=== TripleSoup ===

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

TripleSoup will be an RDF store, tooling to work with that database, and a
REST web interface to talk to that database using SPARQL, implemented as an
apache webserver module. TripleSoup entered incubation on February 5, 2007.

There are currently no issues requiring Incubator PMC or board attention.

  * Two out of three initial codebases have arrived.
  * Current work has focussed on the website, test infrastructure and build
system.
  * Legal clearance of initial codebases has been all but completed and
they're in SVN

=== UIMA ===

iPMC Reviewers: rdonkin, jukka

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:

  * We completed our first incubating release last month, resolving all
legal issues and obtaining the necessary Incubator PMC approval.
  * We also published our first hotfix shortly afterwards, addressing an
issue in our GUI tooling found by our users.


Items to complete before graduation:
  * Attract new committers

Community:
  * Traffic on the uima-user list has started to pick up since our release.
We hope to be able to eventually attract some Apache UIMA users to become
committers.
  * uima-dev list has a good amount of traffic, mostly from the original
committers.
  * We have one contributor, Jorn Kottman who has submitted a few patches.


Code:
  * The UIMA Java framework code has been released
  * The UIMA C++ framework code was donated with a software grant and has
been added to SVN.  We're currently doing the final migration and testing
work to enable a release of the C++ framework.
  * We've established a sandbox and accepted a contribution from Jorn
Kottman



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-- 
Matthias Wessendorf
http://tinyurl.com/fmywh

further stuff:
blog: http://jroller.com/page/mwessendorf
mail: mwessendorf-at-gmail-dot-com