Incubator Board Report January 2009

["Noel J. Bergman" <no...@devtech.com>]

All in all, it has been very quiet since the December report.  Cassandra has
been voted upon to enter incubation, but does not appear to have started and
has not yet reported.  A couple of proposals are under consideration:

  - Scrum/Maestro/Kalumet -- an autodeply project
  - Pivot -- a Java-based Rich Web Client project

The Incubator PMC is also discussing what should be done with respect to
projects that fail to report.  Informal (or formal if you feel it necessary)
input would be appreciated, to general@i.a.o.

One item of note is that the Incubator PMC is trying to remind each project
to include the three (3) items requested by the ASF Board of each report, so
far with mixed results.

----------------------------------------------

= 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 =

Newly entered Incubation.  No activity as yet.


= 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.


= 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.


= 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.


= Imperius =

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
(http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/jsecurity/STATUS)


= JSPWiki =

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 =

Did not report, and the Incubator PMC is currently discussing closing the
project.  Carsten reports that it never really got started.


= Sanselan =

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++.
   * Jorn 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

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.



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