Apache Harmony Board Report, December 2006

["Geir Magnusson Jr." <ge...@pobox.com>]

Apache Harmony Board Report, December 2006
==========================================

Issues requiring the Board's attention: none.

Infrastructure
--------------
We have now completed our second full month of TLP, and with the recent 
creation of our Solaris Zone, we have no outstanding infrastructure 
requests, and thank the ASF infrastructure team for helping us with our 
transition from the Incubator.  We plan on adding a few new mail lists, 
one for our community-distributed build/test system alerts, and 
eventually one for users.

Development
-----------
The project continues to make progress towards it's primary goal of a 
complete implementation of Java SE 5.  We have over 96% of the Java SE 5 
class library complete, and the virtual machine continues to make 
substantial progress.  We look forward to securing the JCK for Java SE 6 
to start integrating it into our build/test frameworks as to immediately 
begin testing the portions of the classlibrary that we believe are spec 
complete.

While I can't quantify the VM as I can the class library in terms of 
measurable completeness, it's clear we're making good progress due to 
the continued improvements in stability, functionality and performance. 
  We also have quite a bit of progress in the area of documentation and 
website, with a committed set of community members focused on that.

In the last month we completed substantial work on our "JDK tools" part 
of the project, which is the code and build infrastructure for the 
additional programs that come with the runtime environment in the "Java 
Development Kit" (aka JDK).  As of now, we have a JDK that has "java" 
(the runtime), "javac" (the Java language to bytecode compiler, based on 
the Eclipse ECJ compiler), "javah" (C header and stub file generator), 
and "keytool" (used for manipulating keys and certificates), and will 
continue to work to complete the full toolchain.

Security
--------
Mid November, a user identified a potential vulnerability in the 
codebase pertaining to a thread being able to mine values owned by other 
   threads in the so-called "ThreadLocal" storage.    This was 
identified on the private@ list, and after the PMC determined that there 
was no real need continued discussion in secrecy, we moved the 
discussion to the public list and resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

Community
---------
On the community front, things are fairly static.  We are seeing a small 
drop in our dev list participation numbers, but there are no known 
reasons why, other than seasonal variability.

In late November, Sun announced the creation of their open source Java 
project called "OpenJDK".  They will be releasing over the next 6 months 
the source code to Java SE 6, under the GPLv2 and GPLv2+Classpath 
Exception licenses.  As of now, they have released their "javac" 
Java-language-to-bytecode compiler and their VM to the community under 
the GPLv2 license.  Currently, they are still working out the details 
regarding their community structure.  We expect that this action will 
have at least a short term affect on our community, simply because it's 
a more advanced codebase, and an alternative community for people to 
participate in.  Overall, though, this is a positive thing for the open 
source Java ecosystem, and we'll continue to look for ways to bridge the 
two communities.

One final community note - the Apache Gump project has been working 
towards using Harmony as a "base" for their activities, and with the 
recent completion of the "javac" compiler in Harmony, we're hoping that 
we'll soon start seeing full Gump runs on the Harmony JDK.

On behalf of the Apache Harmony Project,

geir

Re: Apache Harmony Board Report, December 2006

[Tim Ellison <t....@gmail.com>]

+1

Well written

Tim

Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
> Apache Harmony Board Report, December 2006
> ==========================================
> 
> Issues requiring the Board's attention: none.
> 
> Infrastructure
> --------------
> We have now completed our second full month of TLP, and with the recent
> creation of our Solaris Zone, we have no outstanding infrastructure
> requests, and thank the ASF infrastructure team for helping us with our
> transition from the Incubator.  We plan on adding a few new mail lists,
> one for our community-distributed build/test system alerts, and
> eventually one for users.
> 
> Development
> -----------
> The project continues to make progress towards it's primary goal of a
> complete implementation of Java SE 5.  We have over 96% of the Java SE 5
> class library complete, and the virtual machine continues to make
> substantial progress.  We look forward to securing the JCK for Java SE 6
> to start integrating it into our build/test frameworks as to immediately
> begin testing the portions of the classlibrary that we believe are spec
> complete.
> 
> While I can't quantify the VM as I can the class library in terms of
> measurable completeness, it's clear we're making good progress due to
> the continued improvements in stability, functionality and performance.
>  We also have quite a bit of progress in the area of documentation and
> website, with a committed set of community members focused on that.
> 
> In the last month we completed substantial work on our "JDK tools" part
> of the project, which is the code and build infrastructure for the
> additional programs that come with the runtime environment in the "Java
> Development Kit" (aka JDK).  As of now, we have a JDK that has "java"
> (the runtime), "javac" (the Java language to bytecode compiler, based on
> the Eclipse ECJ compiler), "javah" (C header and stub file generator),
> and "keytool" (used for manipulating keys and certificates), and will
> continue to work to complete the full toolchain.
> 
> Security
> --------
> Mid November, a user identified a potential vulnerability in the
> codebase pertaining to a thread being able to mine values owned by other
>   threads in the so-called "ThreadLocal" storage.    This was identified
> on the private@ list, and after the PMC determined that there was no
> real need continued discussion in secrecy, we moved the discussion to
> the public list and resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
> 
> Community
> ---------
> On the community front, things are fairly static.  We are seeing a small
> drop in our dev list participation numbers, but there are no known
> reasons why, other than seasonal variability.
> 
> In late November, Sun announced the creation of their open source Java
> project called "OpenJDK".  They will be releasing over the next 6 months
> the source code to Java SE 6, under the GPLv2 and GPLv2+Classpath
> Exception licenses.  As of now, they have released their "javac"
> Java-language-to-bytecode compiler and their VM to the community under
> the GPLv2 license.  Currently, they are still working out the details
> regarding their community structure.  We expect that this action will
> have at least a short term affect on our community, simply because it's
> a more advanced codebase, and an alternative community for people to
> participate in.  Overall, though, this is a positive thing for the open
> source Java ecosystem, and we'll continue to look for ways to bridge the
> two communities.
> 
> One final community note - the Apache Gump project has been working
> towards using Harmony as a "base" for their activities, and with the
> recent completion of the "javac" compiler in Harmony, we're hoping that
> we'll soon start seeing full Gump runs on the Harmony JDK.
> 
> On behalf of the Apache Harmony Project,
> 
> geir
>