Directory Project Status

[Alex Karasulu <ao...@bellsouth.net>]

Our last report was posted here:

http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=general@incubator.apache.org&msgNo=3919

Since then we have ...

 o Vetted all IP issues within the project, namely where Snacc4J was 
concerned.  Snickers, the Snacc4J replacement subproject, now supports 
BER and, in a branch maintained by Alan Cabrera, DER as well.  Alan 
Cabrera has been progressing on his ASN.1 compiler but for the time 
being we have hand coded LDAP stubs.  We have also integrated the new 
Snickers based LDAP provider as the default BER codec for the 
ldap-common project.  This is a major step for us on the path toward 
exiting the incubator.

o We have retrofitted the old LDAPd code base with the newly modified 
ldap-common code along with Snickers.  This primitive precursor to Eve 
now runs as it did while at sourceforge however there are no IP issues 
with this functional server.  Users can now kick the tires on an LDAP 
server that works.  We however see this server as more of a demo rather 
than the real deal which will be Eve.

 o We have also made progress on another major aspect that demonstrates 
the viability of this project: building community.  BTW, all new 
committers have signed and submitted their CLAs which are on file and 
software grants were submitted where appropriate.  We have added three 
new committers to the project of which two are still active. 
    - Trustin Lee joined us to work on the frontend networking code and 
is making progress adding UDP support to the new SEDA subproject.  He 
will be continuing to work on making Eve's front end code serve as a 
gateway/proxy server to other LDAP servers soon.
     - Enrique Rodriguez became a committer as well and is working on 
the new integrated Kerberos server which plugs into Eve for network 
authentication.  He is also persuing the goal of writing wrappers for 
Eve to embed Eve into OSGi containers.
     - Niclas Hedman became a commiter and started work on decoupling 
Eve's backend from Merlin, however some Avalon commitments have taken 
his time.

o We have begun to pull the backend subsystem out of the sandbox: this 
is almost complete.  A new schema subsystem design has been added while 
making the move.  I have also removed all depenencies on Avalon and 
Merlin while maintaining the wrappers for Merlin.

o Vincent continues to maintain Janus and is getting into some of the 
LDAP code base while writing unit test cases for them.  Vincent is also 
working on getting all projects rigged into Gump.

o We added two new subprojects.  The first is called the SEDA 
framework.  It is basically the LDAP frontend networking code with all 
LDAP dependencies removed so it can run any protocol.  In fact it can 
run multiple protocols on the same plumbing.  This is what Trustin is 
working on most of all.  The second subproject is a Kerberos server that 
Enrique and I had been working on just toying with from within Eve but 
it wound up being something very attractive so we added it to our 
project rather than leaving it out there.  We don't expect these 
projects to stay under the directory umbrella forever.  We feel this way 
especially since SEDA can be reused anywhere a Java based protocol 
server is needed and the Kerberos server can run in stand alone mode one 
day.  Until then we are comfortable having them here indefinately.

o On the Naming subproject front, Phil Steitz has integrated Naming with 
Gump.  Phil has been very busy in jakarta-commons working on getting an 
excellent new addition, the commons math project, out the door.   
Meanwhile he has been supporting inquiries about Naming and Jira issues 
posted on it.

Conclusions and goals ...

IMO we are doing really well and are very close to our goals.  Perhaps 
before ApacheCon or by the next status report at the latest we should 
have all of Eve's parts up and running.  Meanwhile we're growing the 
community and getting more comfortable working together to support our 
code base.  More people are contacting us about various directory 
subprojects than before so ... if we build it they will come.

Once again on behalf of the Directory Team,
Alex Karasulu