Incubator 2004Q4 Status Report to the ASF Board

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

Status report for the Apache Incubator Project
================================================

Since the last report to the Board, Lenya has become ready to fly the nest;
and new projects such as Agila, Derby, JackRabbit and iBATIS have begun
Incubation.

Infrastructure bottlenecks continue to effect the Incubator.  I say this
without pointing fingers, since as a member of the Infrastructure Team, I am
one of the people responsible for being or removing those bottlenecks.  It
is simply that we can create a rash of requests for project resources, and
we (the Infrastructure Team) are short-staffed.  One thing that should help
will be improved scripts for mailing list creation.  Hopefully, we will have
some time at the Hack-a-thon to work those tools.

Licensing and other IP related issues were reported as an on-going topic of
discussion in the last report, at which time I mentioned that it would help
to have some legal resource(s) participating with the Incubator.  IP issues
have come up this quarter that make it even more imperative that we have
sufficient legal resources working with the Incubator, and the ASF in
general, to address IP issues.

                           - 0 -

The list of projects in the Incubator is at
http://incubator.apache.org/projects/.
Here are the STATUS reports from the PPMCs that have sent one in.


Status report from the Directory PPMC
======================================

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 ...

[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.


Status report for Beehive
========================================

Status file is up to date;
see
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/public/trunk/site-author/projects/
beehive.cwiki,
 or http://incubator.apache.org/projects/beehive.html when site is
regenerated)

Code & Infrastructure
- initial code drop was made in mid-July.  Ongoing development is very
active.
- over the last three months, we've set up svn, jira, the web site and a
wiki.
- we're just starting to make more use of jira.
- docs and tutorials have been recently contributed

Legal
- all code shows ASF copyright notice.
- software grant, individual CLAs, and corporate CLAs, are in place
  for all active committers (one initial committer has no account while
  we wait for his employer to complete review of CLA and CCLA)

Community
- Web services metadata subproject has participation from key members
  of Axis community; however, NetUI and Controls subprojects are still
  primarily driven by BEA employees.  We expect this to begin to change
  after getting out an initial release for the community to experiment
  with and digest.  We have several ApacheCon presentations that we also
  hope will invite more non-BEA developers to be actively involved.

Release Plans
- The community has decided to cut a pre-1.0 release out for ApacheCon.
  This release will follow the incubation release rules requiring a)
incubator
  disclaimer in README and from any download links, b) filename to include
  'incubating', and c) ppmc vote (providing the incubator pmc approval since
  all interested incubator pmc members should be on the beehive ppmc mailing
  list.
- We've also had a generic release plan proposed and discussed.  Also work
  has started on a roadmap document to make it easier for new developers to
  get the big picture and figure out where they can help.


Status report for MyFaces
========================================

All needed CLAs are on file. A code grant is in transit. Accounts for the
committers have been created. Mailing lists are created. Committers are
subscribed. The Jira setup for the project is being finalized. The project
incubator page is created. Committers are preparing the SourceForge CVS for
import to Apache.

One account's credentials were lost in transit (grantsmith). Request to
root@ to resend the credentials to an alternate address was made
14/Oct/2004.


Status report for iBATIS
========================================

All needed CLAs are on file. Code grants are in transit. Accounts for the
committers are created. Mailing lists are created. Committers are
subscribing. The Jira setup for the project is being finalized. The project
incubator page is created. Committers are preparing the SourceForge CVS and
third-party SVN for import to Apache.

Status report for JackRabbit
========================================

The Jackrabbit project has completed all of the Incubator checklist
items in terms of moving to Apache and getting the IP transfer done.
With the help of Maven, we have a full website set up at

    http://incubator.apache.org/jackrabbit/

with a few link bugs due to the svn/viewcvs integration.  Our big
task from now to graduation is to get the community more involved
in development, planning features, integrating with some of the DB
projects, and scoping out interesting applications to build on top
of the interface.


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