Incubator Board Report July 2009

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

The past month has gone well within the Incubator.  Busy, but good.

A number of new committers have been added to projects that were in need of
them.

Sanselan has moved to the Apache Commons project.

VXQuery (http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/VXQueryProposal) is starting
Incubation.

Traffic Server (http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/TrafficServerProposal)
should be doing so soon, as well, and has attracted considerable interest
from the HTTP Server Project.

Extensive discussion amongst the Incubator PMC regarding Bluesky.  There are
definitely some concerns.  Bill Stoddard had a face-to-face meeting with the
team.  With great respect to Bill, we are following his lead on Bluesky, as
he is actively engaged.

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

= Ace =

Apache ACE is a software distribution framework that allows you to centrally
manage and distribute software components, configuration data and other
artifacts to target systems. ACE started incubation on April 24th 2009.

There are currently no issues requiring board or Incubator PMC attention.

Community

 * The Software Grant is on record now, so the initial codebase was imported
and work has started (packages renamed, license headers in place).
 * Documentation has been migrated, entered into the official wiki, now all
setup tasks are resolved.
 * Accepted patches and implemented feedback from both Toni Menzel and
Angelo van der Sijpt.
 * Niclas Hedhman has stepped down as a mentor, and has notified the
incubator PMC. Bertrand Delacretaz replied, suggesting we move on with the
two remaining mentors, Bertrand and Carsten Ziegeler. See [1] and [2].
 * Work has started on implementing a web based client UI for the project.

[1]
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/200907.mbox/%3cca
f30e2a0907022107s6ef28a82g85acf6e9326d90db@mail.gmail.com%3e

[2]
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/200907.mbox/%3cf7
67f0600907060146t3d951bedxd155bd1d76b3b00e@mail.gmail.com%3e

Software

 * Software grant was faxed and is on record now.
 * Atlassian gave us access to their open source build server Bamboo, so we
now have a continuous build system in place.

Licensing and other issues: None at the moment.


= 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.

During the past month, we've been still focusing on replacing FFmpeg and I
forecast pretty progress in the next two months. A huge mistake, which we,
shamefully, hadn't noticed all along, had been found out. It surely is
acceptiable to our group, but it violates the rules of Apache. We are
planning to apply for more committers and accounts to correct this mistake.

Next step: replacing FFmpeg


= Chemistry =

Apache Chemistry is an effort to provide a Java (and possibly others, like
JavaScript) implementation of the upcoming CMIS specification. Chemistry
entered incubation on April 30th, 2009.

There are currently no issues requiring board or Incubator PMC attention.

Community
    * David Caruana has been voted in as committer and member of the PPMC.

Software
    * David Caruana offered contribution of Client Test Harness

Licensing and other issues

    * None at the moment.

Issues before graduation
    * Stabilize the general interest into a sustainable development
community
    * Make sure that all licensing details conform with Apache policies
    * Create an Apache release of the Chemistry codebase


= Empire-db =

DID NOT REPORT


= Imperius =

Imperius has been incubating since November 2007.

Imperius is a rule-based policy evaluation engine

Web site:

Code: Development and bug fixes continue on the code base.

Community:  Several key bugs were fixed, two new committers were added to
the community. Size and diversity of the community has not been improving as
expected.


= JSPWiki =

JSPWiki has been incubating since September 2007.

JSPWiki is a JSP-based wiki program.

During the past three months, the JSPWiki community has not increased
significantly. The developer list now has 83 names, one more than the last
time, and the user list is now 178 people strong, eleven more than three
months ago.

We are completing the checklist on the graduation, but things have slowed
down due to developers taking time on personal issues - some get married,
some get children, some just enjoy holidays.  JSPWiki is still fully a
volunteer project, which shows. The checklist is kept in JIRA, at
http://is.gd/1qkV8

Most of the checklist items are of practical nature rather than real
showstoppers; there is some uncertainty as to when things can be called
"done".

The development of the 3.0 still continues in the SVN, albeit at a reduced
speed due to the aforementioned issues.


= Lucene.Net =

DID NOT REPORT


= 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.

Olio voted a new committer, Amanda Waite.

Olio made its first release, Olio-0.1. Being a complex piece of software
with many third party dependencies and multiple languages, this was a major
task.

Olio is continuing to gain users and being used for diverse purposes.  There
are 28 subscribers to the user list and 26 subscribers to dev.  There are
over a hundred JIRA issues filed, and continuous activity toward closing
them.

The Java implementation for Olio has been checked into the repository,
joining the Rails and Php implementations.

Graduation From Incubation:

Diversity of committers is the primary issue with the project, with all of
the active developers coming from three organizations.


= RCF =

DID NOT REPORT


= Sanselan =

Sanselan has graduated to a sub-project of Apache Commons. This will be the
last report in the incubator.

Active committers on the project have been voted committer status in
Commons. The project infrastructure (mail lists, repository, and web site)
are being migrated to Commons.


= Shiro =

Previously JSecurity/Ki.

Apache Shiro is a powerful and flexible open-source application security
framework that cleanly handles authentication, authorization, enterprise
session management and cryptography.

Apache Shiro has been incubating since June 2008.

* Due to potential naming conflicts with the previously chosen name of 'Ki',
the ASF community at large helped us change our name to 'Shiro'.  This was a
large collaborative effort that really showed the power of the Apache Way
and resulted in a name with which a large majority of people were content.

* Project infrastructure has been switched over to support this name change
and all seems to be running well.  We have yet to properly configure Hudson
for continuous integration builds, but that should be done shortly.  The new
CWIKI space is available here:
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SHIRO

* The name change also affords us to start publishing incubator Maven
snapshot builds which will help foster adoption to all Maven end-users
(which there are many).

* We're very happy to report that the the name change and community support
resulting from it have allowed the development team to return focus to
developing the framework and resolving issues rather than spending time on
name-related administrative issues.

The project team is not considering graduation at this point, as the code is
not ready for an Apache release. Once IP clearance is complete, and Mavne
snapshots are working, we'll attempt our first incubator release.

The status is being maintained at
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/shiro/STATUS


= Socialsite =

DID NOT REPORT


= 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.

Development activities have included adding a locality and layout service,
integrating metrics into ganglia for monitoring, more complicated network
isolation support, and preliminary code for the purpose of communicating
with Maui, a cluster scheduler.  Additionally, the documentation has been
enhanced on the project webpage.

The project is still struggling to grow a substantial user community, but
there are several active contributors.  We are looking forward to the
opportunity to present our work with PRS and Hadoop at SC'09 [1].  In
addition, Tashi is deployed at Intel's OpenCirrus [2] site where it has more
than 20 users.  It is also being installed at CMU's OpenCirrus site.

Items to be resolved before graduation:
        * Prepare and review a release candidate
        * Develop community diversity (currently Intel and CMU committers)

[1] http://scyourway.nacse.org/conference/view/tut168

[2] http://opencirrus.org/


= Thrift =

IPMC reviews: Upayavira

Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services
development. It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to
build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between a variety of
programming languages. Thrift entered the Apache Incubator in May 2008.

Recent Activity of Note:

 * Have created RC1 and RC2 for our 0.1 release, still waiting on votes to
finalize RC2
    * Next step after approval is to present to the Incubator PMC
 * Esteve Fernandez and Alexander Shigin both received passing votes for
committership!
 * Progress made on non-blocking C++ server
 * New language support for compact protocol
 * Work started on an ActionScript generator
 * Java configuration/install process improved
 * Simplified compiler installation process via dependency removal
 * More in-depth comparative analysis of Thrift vs. similar serialization
platforms

Biggest next step for considering graduation is getting the release out
successfully. Licensing issues all seem to be in good shape with no legal
issues.


= UIMA =

UIMA is a component framework for the analysis of unstructured content such
as text, audio and video. UIMA entered incubation on October 3, 2006.

Some recent activity:
    * We're happy to report that Jukka Zitting has taken an interest in UIMA
and is trying to egg us along towards graduation.
    * We're planning another release this summer, and are thus currently
trying to get the code and build process in shape.
    * The CAS Editor was moved from the sandbox to our core Eclipse-based
tooling.
    * A lot of activity hardening the Asynchronous Scaleout component,
getting it ready for release as well.
    * A newly donated annotator component, the Configurable Feature
Extractor, entered the sandbox
    * The Concept Mapper annotator component received a major update (also
in the Sandbox)

Items to complete before graduation:

    * We still need to attract more new committers with diverse
affiliations.
      We have recently seen some activity in that direction and hope we're
on a good way.


= Wink =

Apache Wink is an incubating project that enables development and
consumption of REST style web services. The core server runtime is based on
the JAX-RS (JSR 311) standard. The project also introduces a client runtime
which can leverage certain components of the server-side runtime. Apache
Wink will deliver component technology that can be easily integrated into a
variety of environments.  Wink has been incubating since May 2009.

Notable activity in the Wink project:

  * Source base selected: Both IBM and HP contributed JAX-RS-based runtimes
to the project.  To get things rolling, one had to be selected as the basis
of the trunk.  After some discussion, the decision was to go with the HP
runtime due to its maturity (runtime has been worked for at least 2 years)
over the IBM code and the richness of features.

  * JAX-RS 1.0 compliance: There was work done to get the JAX-RS 1.0 TCK up
and running with Wink.  Thanks to Dan Kulp from CXF for reaching out and
helping the team get that working.  Michael Elman led an effort to get the
necessary JIRAs opened and addressed.  In short order, we became JAX-RS 1.0
compliant on the new source base.

  * 58 JIRAs opened in a little over a month's time.  Some of the were
related to the JAX-RS 1.0 work.  Others have been related to issues surfaced
as the test bucket that IBM contributed has been ported over along with
issues for making sure the runtime is Apache branded.

  * Build automation was setup via Hudson with snapshot builds being updated
in the maven repository.

Things to resolve prior to graduating:

  *  Need to create the first formal release after some JIRA issues are
finished and some more ported tests are complete

  *  Need to grow the user based community



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