Jakarta Newsletter - December 2002

[Rob Oxspring <ro...@apache.org>]

Jakarta Newsletter  
==================
Issue: 6 
Date: December 2002 
Url: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/news/200212.html 

As you would expect of the holiday season, not a lot was happening at
Jakarta other than some discussion, and the usual steady progress in a
number of projects. This issue has been delayed somewhat due to
commitments to my real work, but the next issue will hopefully be a
little more feature rich and prompt as plenty seems to be happening
already!

As always, I want to thank those who contributed and hope that you enjoy
the read. If you would like to comment further on any of the highlighted
discussions then please do so on the appropriate list, if you want to
comment on the newsletter itself then please point your comments to
general@jakarta.apache.org.

Rob Oxspring

Contents  
--------
General 
Commons 
James 
Lucene 
POI 


 
General  
=======
" Ideas, suggestions, and comments on the overall Jakarta project "
Editor: Rob Oxspring

" If continuous integration is a good thing on a small project, why not
apply it recursively and include all dependencies for which access to
source is provided " This has been the reasoning behind Gump [1] and
since so many Jakarta folk agreed [2] it was decided to promote Gump
from within Alexandria to be a first class Jakarta subproject. The tool
has been used to build all the latest versions of the Jakarta code for a
long time now, and does a great job of keeping the developers on their
toes and helps maintain a high level of interoperability between sub
projects.

For those that like Wikis, the turbine team talked us into starting up
our very own. As usual there was plenty of discussion about the pros and
cons, and plenty about the implementation [3,4] but Andy Oliver decided
to get the ball rolling with a simple system with minimal administration
needs [5].

Should Apache move into the world of C#? Does the JCP do Java any
favours? These are the general themes of this months big thread and
since both topics repeatedly come up at Jakarta, it will come as no
surprise to learn that opinions are mixed and conclusions are some time
off. Still, its always fun guessing which way to jump! [6,7]

[1] - http://jakarta.apache.org/gump/ 
[2] -
http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta
.apache.org&by=thread&from=296622 
[3] -
http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta
.apache.org&by=thread&from=294885 
[4] -
http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta
.apache.org&by=thread&from=295289 
[5] - http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi 
[6] -
http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta
.apache.org&by=thread&from=287011 
[7] -
http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta
.apache.org&by=thread&from=286144 
 

 
Commons  
=======
" Creating and maintaining reusable Java components "

BeanUtils 
Betwixt 
Jelly 
Validator 



BeanUtils  
---------
Editor: Robert Burrell Donkin

Work focussed on bug fixes in preparations for the long overdue 1.6
release. This may have happened (at last :) before this newsletter hits
the stands.
 

 
Betwixt  
-------
Editor: Martin van den Bemt

We are preparing for a first alpha release of betwixt. Currently
projects depend on the CVS HEAD version, which needs to change, so we
can refactor and add the things on our todo list (see
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/betwixt/todo.html for the list).
Currently updating the last issues that need to be addressed and
investigation of a possible recursion bug that was reported (see
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=104262475828802&w=
2).

The branch BETWIXT_1_0_ALPHA_1_RELEASE_BRANCH has been created for the
release, to allow new development in HEAD.

Robert Burrell Donkin will be the release manager.
 

 
Jelly  
-----
Editor: Robert Burrell Donkin

This is probably the most active and exciting commons project at the
moment. Jelly is bit hard to describe - it's a tool for turning XML into
executable code. Read more on the website
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/jelly/.

Don't be fooled by the fact that the website says that jelly is still in
the sandbox - jelly was promoted to the commons proper in December:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&m=103918404407914&w=
2
 

 
Validator  
---------
Editor: Henri Yandell

Jakarta Commons Validator 1.0.1 was released. A bugfix release, the
release notes are available at:
http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-commons/release/commons-validat
or/v1.0.1/RELEASE_NOTES.txt
 

 
James  
=====
" James, a 100% pure Java Mail and News server, and Mailet mail
application plat form "
Editor: Danny Angus

Over the Holidays the James team quietly released v2.1 of James, see
details at http://jakarta.apache.org/james. Since then we've been busy
planning the next release of James, most of our plans are on the WIKI
http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?JamesDevelopmentPages.

There's also going to be a revision and new version of the Mailet API
aimed at de-coupling more complex Mailet functionality from the server.

The other big news is that a vote was passed to propose James become a
top-level Apache project. Why? see:
http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=james-dev@jakarta.ap
ache.org&msgId=523569


 
Lucene  
======
" A high-performance, full-featured text search engine "
Editor: Otis Gospodnetic

Doug Cutting added Snowball Stemmers[1] to Lucene Sandbox Repository[2].
Snowball[3] is a small string processing language designed for creating
stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. Snowball Stemmers
for Lucene project provides pre-compiled version of the Snowball
stemmers together with classes integrating them with the Lucene search
engine. 

Previously Lucene supported only English, German, and Russian. Lucene
users can now make use of the code provided by this new project and gain
support for the following languages: 

Danish 
Dutch 
English 
Finnish 
French 
German 
Italian 
Norwegian 
Portuguese 
Russian 
Spanish 
Swedish 

[1] - http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/lucene-sandbox/snowball/ 
[2] - http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/lucene-sandbox/ 
[3] - http://snowball.tartarus.org/ 
 

 
POI  
===
" APIs for manipulating various file formats based upon Microsoft's OLE
2 Compound Document format "
Editor: Glen Stampoultzis

Patch for custom palettes received. [1] 
Andy created a patch for a proposed refactoring of the
EventRecordFactory. [2]. 
Ken was rather busy converting Poi to the latest and greatest Centipede.

release and making it all run under Gump. [3] 
Some idea's on refactoring the formula parser were discussed. [4] 
Ken let us in on the correct way to do releases. [5] 
Patch for recalc record committed [6] 
Support for horizontal centering during print [7] 
Add support for setting the active cell in a worksheet through user
model [8] 

[1] - http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15743 
[2] - http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15660 
[3] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=poi-dev&m=104065623922418&w=2 
[4] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=103973441900001&r=1&w=2 
[5] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=poi-dev&m=103911596709970&w=2 
[6] - http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13500 
[7] - http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15677 
[8] - http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15537 


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