Fwd: [DRAFT] Jakarta Newsletter - July 2002

[Ceki Gülcü <ce...@qos.ch>]

Given that I am preparing the next draft of the complete log4j manual before
leaving on vacation, I do not have the time to submit a log4j related
news item. Would anyone else like to take over?

Thank in advance,

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>Subject: [DRAFT] Jakarta Newsletter - July 2002
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>Jakarta Newsletter
>==================
>Issue: 2
>Date: July 2002
>Url: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/news/200207.html
>
>Well, another month has passed and its time for the second monthly
>review of whats been going on at Jakarta. The Ant team have been working
>through some of the ideas dubbed too controversial for 1.5, while the
>Avalon bunch have been fixing up their documentation. CLI have been
>merging the Avalon-CLI code with their own new features and the
>Discovery and Morphos projects finally got some CVS space. Finally OJB
>and Struts have been in a bug fixing phase.
>
>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
>ObJectRelationalBridge
>Struts
>
>
>
>General
>=======
>Editor: Rob Oxspring
>
>After being "beaten up heavily" the last time he proposed it, Pier
>Fumagalli decided to have a second attempt at allowing people to be
>members of the Jakarta community without being involved in a particular
>codebase first [1]. The opinions were mixed as before and one of the
>proposed solutions was to promote the jakarta-site CVS module to normal
>subproject status, again views were mixed [2].
>
>Apache software often involves external tools and libraries and a
>recurring topic on the mailing lists involves how the licences of these
>libraries interact with the ASF's own licences. This month there were a
>couple of useful summaries of the major points to watch out for [3]
>although as ever, don't expect a definitive answer here - speak to a
>good software lawyer instead.
>
>Richard Pitt of TogetherSoft offered Jakarta an academic licence for
>ControlCenter so that UML diagrams could be produced and maintained for
>jakarta projects [4] WHATS THE CONCLUSION HERE?.
>
>The POI team were a little concerned that some potential new logos may
>come a little close to the MS Office(tm) originals, the discussion took
>place on general to get a broader opinion base and the mood was
>pessimistic [5].
>
>[1] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102580965400001&r=1&w=2&n=33
>[2] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102811263900001&r=1&w=2&n=10
>[3] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102762881600004&r=1&w=2&n=11
>[4] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102708393700004&r=1&w=2&n=86
>[5] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102641802400002&r=1&w=2&n=8
>
>
>
>Ant
>===
>"Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool"
>Editor: Erik Hatcher
>
>Ant has been modified to support all tasks outside of <target> (in the
>current CVS version only, at the moment) [1].
>
>Costin Monolache is spearheading an implementation of an <import>
>facility with much discussion of the gory details of how this will work
>especially with the -projecthelp switch. This work is in the
>proposal/embed tree of Ant's CVS [2].
>
>A large discussion on target-less build files has occurred [3, 4, 5, 6]
>
>Erik Hatcher and Steve Loughran, with Manning's permission, contributed
>a concise and accurate Ant 1.5 PDF task reference from their
>hot-off-the-press Java Development with Ant book. This lives in Ant's
>CVS and will likely be included in any bug fix releases of Ant 1.5 [14,
>15].
>
>Costin started a large thread with "itches for Ant 1.6" [9]. Steve
>Loughran followed with his wishlist for the next version of Ant [7].
>
>Splitting optional.jar into separate JAR libraries was a hot topic in
>July [8].
>
>Conor MacNeill withdraws his Mutant Ant2 proposal [10].
>
>By far the most active thread was on the never-ending topic of Ant2,
>with notable discussions of importing reusable project pieces and
>project extensibility and overridability [11].
>
>dIon Gillard stirred things up with an "inflamatory e-mail" early in the
>month, sparking lots of Ant2 discussion [12].
>
>Last, but not least - Ant 1.5 was released and has proven itself solid
>[13].
>
>[1] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=101543270100009&r=1&w=2&n=17
>[2] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102767954900003&r=1&w=2&n=14
>[3] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102750506600002&r=1&w=2&n=27
>[4] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102704723700002&r=1&w=2&n=32
>[5] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102740536200001&r=1&w=2&n=16
>[6] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102697608600008&r=1&w=2&n=38
>[7] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102736845700003&r=1&w=2&n=37
>[8] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102689872400003&r=1&w=2&n=44
>[9] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102649786700004&r=1&w=2&n=42
>[10] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102635682000001&r=1&w=2&n=36
>[11] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102608695800001&r=1&w=2&n=91
>[12] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102604006200002&r=1&w=2&n=40
>[13] - http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-ant/release/v1.5/
>[14] -
>http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/jakarta-ant/docs/appendix_e
>.pdf?rev=1.1&content-type=application/pdf
>[15] - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1930110588
>
>
>
>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
>
>The Avalon team has been busy fixing the ills that have plagued their
>document building for so long. It has also been brought to our attention
>that the current avalon skin (derrived from the Tigris/Maven sites)
>displays rather poorly with IE 5.5, but ok with many other browsers. The
>Avalon team is looking at upgrading the skin shortly, which is easy to
>do with the Cocoon doc build system.
>
>In other news, The Avalon team is looking at unifying two of their
>component containers. Merlin and Fortress were being developed with
>separate goals in mind, but they both recognize the strengths that the
>other container had. As a result, Fortress will be taking on the
>meta-info features of Merlin, and Merlin will be adding the more robust
>component instance management of Fortress.
>
>On the topic of 'avalonized' applications is good news as well. A
>wrapper for Catalina (the servlet engine in Tomcat) has been developed.
>The proposed avalonized version of Turbine's Services Framework is also
>making good progress.
>
>The last major recent addition to Avalon concerns JMX management. Avalon
>Phoenix has improved its automatic management capabilities even further,
>and a GUI client is in the works.
>
>
>
>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
>Discovery
>Lang
>Morphos
>
>
>
>CLI
>---
>"Commons CLI provdes a simple API for working with the command line
>arguments and options"
>Editor: John Keyes
>
>July was a month of consolidation for CLI with refactoring the current
>code base and implementing new features.
>
>Parsers are now constructed using the CommandLineParserFactory[1].
>
>Usage information is now automatically generated[2].
>
>Options can now be created using OptionBuilder[3]. This makes it much
>easier to add features to Option.
>
>A discussion[4] was held with the Avalon team which has resulted in a
>number of feature requests[5].
>
>Validation for Option creation has also been added[6].
>
>[1] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102537994700001&r=1&w=2
>[2] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102642398900004&r=1&w=2
>[3] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102772419800006&r=1&w=2
>[4] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102750811500003&r=1&w=2
>[5] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102812124400007&r=1&w=2
>[6] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102786757700003&r=1&w=2
>
>
>
>Discovery
>---------
>"The Digester project shall create and maintain a XML -> Java object
>mapping package"
>Editor: Richard A. Sitze
>
>New subproject that represents the recurring pattern (JAXP/Xerces,
>commons-logging, ??) for finding a class implementing a given interface.
>Locating, instantiating, and caching (assumes singletons, or at least
>singletons within some context) of classes (factories), and locating
>property files for configuring same. Includes best-practices guide for
>usage.
>
>As a separate subproject, I (and I assume others as the interest strikes
>them) am more inclined to devote some effort to improving efficiency and
>increasing smarts of this facility. In this light, current improvements
>over original code (extracted from commons-logging):
>
>- minimizes 'redundant' class loaders (but doesn't eliminate)
>- provides logical 'grouping', allows different groups of
>components/applications to maintain different factories.
>- seeking for better/smarter caching mechanism.
>
>
>
>Lang
>----
>"Commons.Lang, a package of Java utility classes for the classes that
>are in java.lang's hierarchy"
>Editor: Henri Yandell
>
>Jakarta Commons Lang have released a beta of their highly reusable
>utility classes dedicated to improving classes in java.lang. The
>immediate aim of the Lang component has been to serve other Jakarta
>projects, unifying such things as NestedException structures, String
>utilities and various Object handling methods. Lang is already being
>used by a host of projects, both inside Jakarta and outside, and the
>code involved is mature and stable having been assembled from existed
>Jakarta and non-Jakarta projects.
>
>
>
>Morphos
>-------
>"a project called Morphos with the scope of transforming file formats."
>Editor: Nicola Ken Barozzi
>
>Morphos in commons-sandbox has finally had its initial code checkin by
>nicolaken, after very fruitful discussions on the commons-dev list.
>
>Basically it became evident that a Morpher should not deal with
>immutable objects, and that will be done by Transformer(s), the
>interface of which is in commons-sandbox Patterns project.
>Avalon-Excalubur has a Converter package that can be the base for a
>package of Transformer implementation.
>
>Sven Kuenzler svenk@gmx.net has been very active in this month on
>Morphos, both in discussions and patches, and is the first real Mrphos
>developer. Thank you Sven :-)
>
>
>
>ObJectRelationalBridge
>======================
>"an Object/Relational mapping tool that allows transparent persistence
>for Java Objects against relational databases"
>Editor: Thomas Mahler
>
>Being exposed as a Jakarta project brought us many new users who found
>several bugs and had many ideas for improvements and new features. Thus
>we had to react quickly and launch two public releases in July!
>
>There have been major improvements to the setup routine. We have
>incorporated several user suggestions to make setup as easy as possible.
>
>The documentation has been completely restructured and updated.
>
>We redesigned the connection management. OJB is now able to cooperate
>better with app-server connection pools. For non-managed environments we
>now provide a commons-pool based connection pool.
>
>There is now a tool that allows verification of the mapping repository
>against the target database.
>
>We also implemented a forward engineering tool that generates all
>required tables from the mapping repository.
>
>The loading of 1:n associations has been redesigned. This resulted in a
>drastic performance gain.
>
>
>
>Struts
>======
>"to provide an open source framework for building Web applications"
>Editor: Joe Germuska
>
>* Struts 1.1b2: Twelve Bugs Away
>Most of the activity on Struts-Dev in July was dedicated to swatting
>bugs en route to a 1.1b2 release. Although that release is no scheduled,
>as of 2002-08-03, there are only 12 outstanding bugs.[1]
>
>[1] - http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs/jakarta-struts/STATUS
>
>* Struts meets JSTL-EL
>David M Karr stepped up to spearhead an effort to extend the Struts SP
>tag libraries to support the JSTL Expression Language. [2] Discussion
>and work continue actively. Late in the month a discussion thread [3]
>helped to summarize the current state of development. At this time, the
>work is aimed at integrating with the JSTL, which will therefore require
>Servlet 2.3/JSP 1.2 to use the JSTL Expression Language. Along the way,
>Struts tags which perform essentially equivalent tasks to JSTL tags are
>expected to be left behind.
>
>[2] -
>http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=struts-dev@jakarta.a
>pache.org&msgNo=9378
>[3] -
>http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listId=41&by=thread&from=2
>07178
>
>* Commons File Upload component integrated
>Martin Cooper introduced an implementation of the
>MultipartRequestHandler interface which adapts the commons-upload
>component for use in a Struts application.[4] As of the 20020728 nightly
>build, this is the default implementation of the interface.
>
>[4] -
>http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=struts-dev@jakarta.a
>pache.org&msgNo=9648
>
>* Extending Struts XML Configuration
>Early in the month, Brian Topping suggested exposing the Commons
>Digester configuration so that developers could use the "struts-
>config.xml" for arbitrary application configuration [5] Craig McClanahan
>pointed out that Struts depends on a validated schema because certain
>default values are specified in the struts-config DTD[6] At the time,
>Craig suggested that that opening up struts-config would wait until
>after a 1.1 is released, when an XML Schema might be developed. However,
>later in the month, Craig made a series of changes to the central
>"ActionServlet" controller. By moving the default values into the
>configuration beans, he eliminated the dependency on a validating parse
>of struts-config.xml. Around the same time, a "rulesets" servlet
>initialization parameter was added, allowing users to specify a list of
>classes implementing the Digester RuleSet interface. Thus, after these
>changes, application developers have the ability to use the basic struts
>initialization process to do just about any application configuration
>they require.
>
>[5] -
>http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=struts-dev@jakarta.a
>pache.org&msgNo=9325
>[6] -
>http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=struts-dev@jakarta.a
>pache.org&msgNo=9333
>
>* Other Struts News: http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/news.html
>
>18 July 2002 - JavaBoutique Struts Tutorials
>17 July 2002 - StrutsTestCase v1.8 Released
>11 July 2002 - Scioworks Camino v2.0
>11 July 2002 - Easy Struts v0.4 for Eclipse / JBuilder
>10 July 2002 - Using Struts in Oracle JDeveloper 9i Tutorial
>09 July 2002 - Struts Console version 2.0
>09 July 2002 - Struts Adoption article
>08 July 2002 - Struts article in e-Promagazine
>08 July 2002 - JAAS article highlighting Authorization and
>Authentication with Struts
>
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Ceki


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