Jakarta Oct->Dec report (fwd)

[Henri Yandell <ba...@apache.org>]

Below is the report on the Jakarta project that the board received last 
week.

Last quarter my priority was to try and get approval to let us use 
Hibernate, and more generally any LGPL project with their clause added. 
The latest status here (unofficially, ie) me saying what I think I can 
say) is that there seems to be general agreement that it's good and we're 
in the queue to get the ASF legal team to look at it. My plan is to step 
back for a few weeks and see what happens before sending more hassling 
emails.

This quarter my priority is going to be to get as much of Jakarta migrated 
from CVS to SVN as possible. This is being recorded at 
http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/Migrating_20to_20Subversion and so far half 
of Jakarta is somewhere on the road from being nudged to being in SVN.

Lastly, thanks for all the effort spent on the subproject reports this 
quarter. The rule for needing a subproject report (release, promotion etc) 
worked well and everyone mucked in.

Hen

== October-December 2004 ==

=== Status ===

The last three months have seen the first migrations from CVS to SVN in the 
Jakarta project with the ORO and Velocity projects moving over. More projects 
are expected to move over in the next quarter, with ECS and Commons being the 
first two targetted.

The board suggested that the previous report needed more sub-project news, and 
so for this reoprt any sub-project that has a release, or a change in status, 
needs to supply a short piece of text on the current situation for that part of 
Jakarta. The community has responded very well and the chair has not had to 
write any of the subproject section this time around.

Being able to use LGPL has been brought up a few times in the last quarter. It 
has come up with a desire to use Hibernate in various codebases and Dumbster 
for unit tests in Commons-Email. Dumbster relicenced under ASL 2.0 wihle 
Hibernate use is still unsolved. Linked to this was a similar issue with 
JGraph, which dual-licenced with MPL in order to allow us to use it, though the 
move for this did not come from within the Jakarta community afaik. I'll be 
aiming to report back to the community on the status of this issue in the week 
after the next board meeting.

On the licence side, a Commons component (VFS) wishes to have a component which 
depends on a Novell licence. We're currently treating this as similar to Sun's 
licensing for JavaMail. Imports allowed, but no jars in CVS or iBiblio.

Additionally, we have a Clover license for use by Jakarta (and the rest of the 
ASF). This should make it easier for us to show the high level of our unit 
tests.

In terms of releases, the major points of this quarter's releases are a set of 
1.0's from the Commons sub-project (Math, Configuration, Jelly-RC1, Chain) 
which shows that the Commons community continues to grow, and the stable Tomcat 
5.5 release, our most popular product.

=== Possible plans for the next quarter ===

  * Lucene and Slide both considering TLP.
  * Commons HttpClient to Jakarta sub-project.
  * Turbine JCS to Jakarta sub-project.
  * More Subversion migrations - ECS and Commons in the planning.
  * Turbine migration to SVN under consideration -- desire JCS resolution.
  * Improvement of the download page.
  * Automate creation of Maven bundles and automate bundle uploading to Maven 
repository, even for projects which use Ant (not Maven) for building.

=== Releases ===

==== December ====
  * 9 December 2004 - Commons Chain 1.0
  * 9 December 2004 - Commons Math 1.0
  * 7 December 2004 - Lucene 1.4.3
  * 3 December 2004 - Commons Validator 1.1.4
  * 2 December 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.5-beta

==== November ====
  * 25 November 2004 - Tomcat 5.0.30-beta
  * 23 November 2004 - Commons Jelly 1.0-RC1
  * 21 November 2004 - Commons HttpClient 3.0 beta1
  * 19 November 2004 - JMeter 2.0.2
  * 10 November 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.4 (first stable release of Tomcat 5.5)

==== October ====
  * 30 October 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.4-alpha
  * 28 October 2004 - Turbine 2.3.1
  * 17 October 2004 - Tapestry 3.0.1
  * 11 October 2004 - Tomcat 4.1.31-stable
  * 11 October 2004 - Commons HttpClient 2.0.2
  * 11 October 2004 - Commons Configuration 1.0
  * 06 October 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.3-alpha
  * 06 October 2004 - Tomcat 5.0.29-beta
  * 04 October 2004 - Commons Betwixt 0.6

=== Community changes ===

===== New ASF members =====
  * 19 November 2004 - Yoav Shapira (yoavs) - Tomcat, Commons

===== New PMC members =====

  * 11 October 2004 - James Mason (masonjm) - Slide
  * 19 October 2004 - Robert Burell Donkin (rdonkin) - Commons

===== New Committers =====
  * 4 December 2004 - Warwick Burrows (wburrows) - Slide
  * 12 November 2004 - Oliver Heger (oheger) - Commons
  * 7 November 2004 - Hans Gilde (hgilde) - Commons
  * 6 November 2004 - Bernhard Messer (bmesser) - Lucene
  * 25 September 2004 - David Spencer (dspencer) - Lucene

=== Infrastructure news ===


=== Subproject news ===

  (based on projects that have had a notable event, ie) release, change of 
location within Jakarta)

  * Commons
    * Betwixt
      Betwixt is a bean <-> xml binder. Jakarta Commons Betwixt 0.6 featured a 
refactored codebase including rewriting bean reading code but preserved 
backwards compatibility with the earlier releases. A 0.6.1 release (with more 
functionality and some bug fixes) is expected soon. Betwixt is small component 
closely related to several other commons components. The Betwixt community is 
very happy in the commons.

    * Chain
      Commons Chain 1.0 was finally released, the component having been promoted 
from the sandbox to Commons Proper in July. We expect to see Chain put into use 
almost immediately by projects such as Apache Struts.

    * Configuration
      Commons Configuration is an API to deal easily with various configuration 
formats (properties files, xml files, JNDI...) We have finally stabilized and 
released the first official release after a slow maturation of 3 years across 
various Jakarta projects. Many new ideas are floating around and a new release 
(1.1) is expected in late December or early January.

    * Daemon
      Commons Daemon, although quiet on the mailing list and in Bugzilla, has 
seen a few bug fixes and improvements.
      Efforts have been made to improve stability on various operating systems. 
A Commons-Daemon 1.1 release is forthcoming, most likely in early 2005.

    * Email
      A few very enthusiastic volunteers have helped re-energize Commons Email. 
Extensive unit tests were submitted via Bugzilla, a few lingering bugs were 
cleared up and documentation was extended.  This activity led to a successful 
vote for promotion from the Sandbox.

      In preparation for the promotion, it was realized that there was an issue 
with the [http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/ Dumbster] library, which is used 
for unit tests and which was only available under the LGPL license.  When this 
was brought up with the developer of Dumbster, he agreed to change his license 
to ASF 2.0.

      A vote on a 1.0 release is likely to be called soon after the promotion is 
completed.

      Commons Email and Commons Chain have recently run into issues using Maven 
as a build tool with their dependencies on libraries which are only distributed 
under the Sun Binary Code License.  One of Maven's strengths is the automatic 
retrieval of dependencies, but the SBCL prevents hosting of these libraries on 
a public Maven repository.  Individual developers must retrieve these libraries 
independently.  This issue also is also complicating automated build processes. 
An enhancement request has been filed for the Maven Ant plugin which may help 
some, but our understanding is that the terms of this license will continue to 
require more manual intervention for these projects than for other Commons 
projects.

    * HttpClient
       HttpClient has entered the 3.0 beta stage.  The API is now frozen unless 
major problems are discovered.  We hope to have a final 3.0 release by the end 
of 2004 or early 2005.

       Now that 3.0 is nearing completion we anticipate beginning HttpClient 4.0 
soon.  This release will feature a number of major changes with the main focus 
on making HttpClient more compact and reusable.  The core HTTP library will be 
refactored into into smaller separable pieces with the HTTP methods separated 
into request/response pairs.  We also plan to start working on a number of 
application level components such as a simple HTTP proxy, web crawler, etc. 
that build upon HttpClient.  The core library and components will be released 
at the Jakarta level.

    * Jelly
      We are finally nearing a 1.0 release. We've put out a release candidate, 
have some minor bugs to address and are looking to
      better our documentation of Jelly's taglibs.

    * Math
      We have finally released 1.0 after a laborious 18 months of steady 
commitment by the whole team.

    * Resources
      Resources has been promoted out of the Sandbox and into Commons Proper. 
This component has been around, and has been stable, for some time now. A 1.0 
release is anticipated in the near future.

    * Transaction
      Transaction has been promoted out of the Sandbox and into Commons Proper 
and a 1.0 release candidate has been released. Transaction provides utility 
classes commonly used in transactional Java programming.

    * Validator
       Validator 1.1.4 has been released.  This is a minor maintenance release 
to the 1.1.x branch adding a couple of missing properties to the API.

  * Slide
      The Slide community is working towards the 2.1 release. It introduces lots 
of new features and fixes most important bugs of Slide 2.0.

      As Slide has become huge with lots of different components grouped around 
WebDAV releasing single components all by themselves now is an option.

  * Tapestry
      The current stable release is 3.0.1. Work is well under way by Howard 
Lewis Ship and others for 3.1, which will have major changes, including 
friendly URLs, HiveMind for services, simplified component parameters, and 
simplified page parameters. The community of users has been growing rapidly.

  * Tomcat
      Tomcat reached a significant milestone with the first stable release of 
the 5.5 branch, v5.5.4. The release has been well-received, with only a small 
number of bug reports, especially given the magnitude of the changes from 
Tomcat 5.0.x.

      Work continues on the 5.0.x branch in maintenance mode, fixing significant 
bugs as well as any security, Spec-compliance, and showstopper issues as 
always.  The 5.0.30 release was cut near the end of November, addressing the 
vast majority of open 5.0.x issues.

      Older branches of Tomcat (3.x, 4.x), are practically at end-of-life 
support.  There are no planned releases for them at this time, although 
individual Tomcat committers may continue working on the code base.

      The Tomcat connectors have also been active, led by Mladen Turk's efforts. 
Mod_jk2 is officially at end-of-life as well: while a worthy experiment, its 
design proved too fragile, resulting in numerous significant bugs.  Maintenance 
and improvements continue on the original mod_jk, as well as joint work with 
httpd developers on a new mod_proxy extension slated for inclusion in the 2.1 
versions of Apache httpd.

      There has been significant effort by the Tomcat developers and members of 
the community to shore up documentation, both in the Tomcat-proper (i.e. part 
of our CVS), and in our FAQ, Wiki, and external resources.  We've seen a 
demonstrated reduction in the documentation-related complaints and questions 
over the past couple of months, and intend to continue working in this area.

  * Turbine
    Turbine is working towards a new major release, 2.4 which will be based on a 
componentized architecture. A second milestone is expected in December. The 
first components from the Fulcrum repostitory have been voted and released.


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Re: Jakarta Oct->Dec report (fwd)

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

On 21 Dec 2004, at 18:10, Henri Yandell wrote:

<snip>

> Lastly, thanks for all the effort spent on the subproject reports this 
> quarter. The rule for needing a subproject report (release, promotion 
> etc) worked well and everyone mucked in.

and thanks to you for your hard work keeping the good ship jakarta 
afloat during this last quarter.

- robert


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