December 2008 Incubator Board Report

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

December 2008 Incubator Board Report
------------------------------------

Just a generally nice month.

CouchDB, Qpid and Abdera have graduated from the Incubator.  Stonehenge and
ESME are new entries into the Incubator.  A candidate up for vote is
Cassandra.  As discussed in last month's report, rather than fork the
project, the Cassandra community decided to move to the ASF.  Feedback has
generally been very positive about this change of plans.

The Composer project has been retired, and resources have been cleaned up.
Not sure what is happening with log4php, but have asked the Mentors to
advise.

There are still some birthing pains with BlueSky.  The new website is
published by IP, not domain, and should be hosted at the ASF.  Mentors need
to address this matter.  There also seem to be continued questions about the
source code.

Etch has an infrastructure issue.  Brett Porter is trying to help.  Perhaps
Bill Rowe might also jump in, since the issue appears to be setting up an
MS-Windows based build environment, and he's had an interest in that for
some time.

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

Per-project reports:


= 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.

In the past month, we set up the website and applied for a new international
ip address. Here is the website link: http://202.117.16.249. We've already
put three version of source code, including complete version, clean version
with project files (the project files are autogenerated by Anjuta, in case
it may violate ASL, we divide the source code into two types, with or
without project files) and purely clean version. We hope that someone could
double check the legality of the clean source code so we can upload the
source code soon.

Top priorities:

    *upload our source code to SVN repository. As soon as the code is
granted by Apache community, this thing shoulde be finished quite soon.

IPMC comments:

   * jukka: Why the new server and web site? I don't seem to be able to
access it (I'm in Switzerland).
   * clr: What does it mean "as soon as the code is granted by Apache
community"?


= Click =

Click is a page and component oriented Java web framework.

Click has been incubating since July 2008.

Tasks completed since November:
 * SVN code base was succesfully migrated to ASF repository.
 * Click website was ported and is now hosted at the Incubator.

Top priorities:
 * Replace incompatible third party software which includes the JavaScript
libraries JSCalendar and TinyMCE.
 * Cut the first official Apache release.
 * Import issues from existing JIRA.


= 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.


= Etch =

Etch was accepted into Incubator on 2 September 2008.

Etch is a cross-platform, language- and transport-independent framework for
building and consuming network services. The Etch toolset includes a network
service description language, a compiler, and binding libraries for a
variety of programming languages.

After the stumbling blocks reported last month, i.e. trouble to get going
with infrastructure, the project is now up and running. All external code,
documentation and Jira issues have been ported into the Apache Etch project.
Development activity is medium (~30 commits in 2 weeks), from mainly two
developers. The first posts to the etch-user list is promising, but
development list is still a "Post Jira -> Fix It" without much mailing list
discussion. This will be the main focal point to resolve over the next
quarter.

The main splash page (http://incubator.apache.org/projects/etch.html) is
still incomplete. The process to update the main page is burdensome. I've
seen someone else suggest using an automated background process to
incorporate changes and strongly support that idea.

The last remaining infrastructural issue is to find a home for our
continuous build system. It requires a Windows home because of C# and
microsoft visual studio components.


= Hama =

Hama has been incubating since 19 May, 2008. It is a parallel matrix
computational package based on Hadoop Map/Reduce.

Development activity is medium from mainly two developer, we focus on
proofing/benchmarking current code/algorithm recently. A number of inactive
initial contributors stepped down from the project. And, 'Saumel Guo' joined
to hama project as a new committer.

 * We are looking for more mathmathicians/committers
 * We will plan for our first release


= Kato =

Kato was accepted into the Incubator on 6 November 2008.

Kato is a project to develop the Specification, Reference Implementation,
and TCK for JSR 326: the JVM Post-mortem Diagnostics API

Kato is just starting up; most of the infrastructure work has now been done;
mailing lists, SVN, JIRA etc. created. Most initial committer user IDs have
been requested, still waiting on the last couple of CLAs.

The next steps for Kato are agreeing the highest level user stories that
will drive the JSR design and seeding the repository with the code
contributed by IBM.


= log4php =

Failed to report.  Checking the mailing lists, there is minimal, but present
traffic on both the developer and user lists.  The last commit was two
months ago by Jim.


= 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.

 * The project web page has now been created at
http://incubator.apache.org/olio
 * An Overview presentation has been posted at
http://incubator.apache.org/olio/index.data/Olio_Overview_long.pdf
 * Initial committers' accounts are all set up now.
 * Two external users (i.e not belonging to the original committers'
organizations) have started running Olio.
 * Olio Rails code has been committed to repository.
 * Several bugs have been filed and are being actively worked on.


= 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 first report

 * The SVN, mailing lists and JIRA setup are done.
 * Project status page is completed and updated.
 * Project web site is created.
 * SVN directory structure is created.
 * Project code is dropped from the sourceforge to the SVN.
 * Project source code commit is started to add new functionalities to the
implementation.
 * Project defects are written to the JIRA page.

We are working to get more attraction to the project. Belows are the task we
will handle

 * We will try to finish the first alpha version.
 * We will create some documentation in the project web site.
 * We will looking for getting more committers.


= RAT =

RAT has struggled to gain any additional development community since joining
the incubator. The small developer base means that releases are not really
possible. Without releases, it's hard to find motivation for development of
new functions for - what is - a mature code base. As a component of the
Apache and Incubator release infrastructure, it made sense to bring RAT
here. From the RAT project perspective, it made much less sense.


= River =
River is aimed at the development and advancement of the Jini technology
core infrastructure. Jini technology is a service oriented architecture that
defines a programming model which both exploits and extends Java technology
to enable the construction of secure, distributed systems which are adaptive
to change.

In November, Niclas Hedhman stepped up as a new Mentor for the project. He
thinks River/Jini is too important to be ignored. This resulted in an
extended discussion of what should actually happen with River. Quite a few
voices have been heard, BUT most committers are quiet, which is worrying.
The things that the vocal people can agree on are probably:

 * River needs new goals. The community is unable to define a single goal or
agree on a couple of them.

 * People should not talk the talk, if they can't walk the walk. The
infamous 'itch' is obviously not strong enough in any particular area, not
enough low-hanging fruit so to speak. Niclas presented a simple solution;
branch trunk and let those who are active to make the structural changes
needed for a sustained future. Hopefully, those more experienced will also
get excited and help out when they can.

 * Consolidation of external Jini projects. There are many external Jini
projects. Some of those provide same or similar solutions. Many in the
community think that these should merge, possibly under the River umbrella.

But there are many things where there are more opinions than there are
people. Right now, we feel that is being a good thing, since it indicates a
strong interest in the technology, and the challenge is to funnel this
energy into something constructive, with or without the initial committers.

All in all, River project is slow, but we think we have a lot of willingness
in the user community, and just need the lever to exploit this. The goal for
now, up until the next report, is to get us going on Apache River "New
Generation", where we indeed shake off the Sun heritage and start moving
forward.

Incubating since December 2006


= Shindig =

Shindig is a reference implementation of the OpenSocial and gadgets stack,
incubating since: 2007-12-06.  The active community has built two parallel
implementations of the OpenSocial and gadgets spec; one in Java and one in
PHP.  Currently the Shindig community is working toward an incubation
release of the OpenSocial v0.8.1 spec as well as implementing the new
functionality defined in OpenSocial v0.9.

Top 2 things to resolve prior to graduation:
 * Improve diversity of committers (progress, but on-going)
 * Run through at least one release (first release scheduled to go out by
end of year)


= Stonehenge =

Stonehenge was just recently accepted into the Incubator. So far we have:
 * Set up the SVN, JIRA and Mailing lists
 * Added all the committers who have a CLA on file
 * Built a very basic website
 * Had a code donation from WSO2
 * We are awaiting more code donation
 * We still need to create our incubator status page and add to the list of
incubator projects


= 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.

Work has been progressing toward an initial test installation of Tashi via
the OpenCirrus testbed (http://www.opencirrus.org/).  This has consumed much
of
the developers' time.  During this though, a few minor changes were made to
the
code to make it more amenable to deployment.

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
        * Migrate the project to Apache infrastructure (begin using Jira)
        * Community diversity (currently Intel and CMU committers)
        * Demonstrate ability to create Apache releases


= VCL =

VCL has been going through the startup phase of the project and the
remainder of the new accounts
were created over the last month.  The codebase is in the process of being
moved to the ASF.  The developers at
NC State were completing their work in progress for 2.0 and will transfer it
shortly.  Until then the project is
flying a holding pattern.

In the interim we'll start some of the more mundane tasks like getting the
web site setup and shtuffes like that.



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