Incubator Board Report July 2008

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

July 2008 Board Incubator Report

THE major topic of discussion has continued to be the Maven repository.  A
thread, "Do we really need an incubator?", was started by Dims, but the real
issue raised was over the perceived watering down of Incubator seperation as
a consequence of Maven's repository handling.  The current emerging
consensus appears to be that there are real and significant
issues/consequences to the ASF, but they are not Incubator specific.
Whether they are something for the Board, Membership and/or Infrastructure
Team to take up is orthogonal to the issues of the Incubator.  Short of
banning the use of the Maven repository for all Incubator artifacts, there
is little that makes sense for the Incubator to address.

We did commit a change to the Incubator documentation better describing the
process for electing Committers.

Empire-DB has been voted to start Incubation. Click is currently under
consideration.  An image gallery project is also under active discussion and
consideration.

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

=== Hama ===

Incubating since: 19 May 2008

The intial donation of Hama from the google project was done, but we should
firstly discuss and define the architecture before collaboration.

IPMC comments: "Before collaboration"?  Shouldn't that be done
collaboratively?

 * Hama has been approved by technical commitee at NHN.
   * But, Some people (Joosun, Changhee) are still waiting for make entries
in a CCLA.
   * The 128-node Hama test cluster was configured at the Korean Research
Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB).
 * We (see http://wiki.apache.org/hama/ScaLAPACK) met Prof. Choi J., who is
a member of the ScaLAPACK team.
   * The Hama is also good fit with block algorithms using two-dimensional
grids.


=== Imperius ===

Imperius has been incubating since November 2007.

Imperius is a rule-based infrastructure management tool

Code:

Made several enhancements to the code:

  1. Added cascaded policy evaluation capability for Java-SPL. This allows
one policy to invoke another as part of its decision.
  2. Access to private members of anchor classes using java-bean style
get/set methods
  3. Added ability to make complex calls like a.b.c() in the decision
section.

Community:

A couple of new teams are trying to prototype with Imperius  (2 from IBM, 1
university). No new committers or contributors since the last report.

The initial set of committers is still incomplete. The issue is slow
resolution of the CCLA/ICLA contracts in BigCo.

Graduation is not on the table based on the size and diversity of the
community; and there has not been a release of code.



=== JSPWiki ===

JSPWiki has been incubating since September 2007.

JSPWiki is a JSP-based wiki program.

During the past three months, the JSPWiki community seems to still enjoy a
steady increase.  The developer list now has 59 names, an increase of 15%.
The user list is now 142 people strong, a growth of 18%. In addition, the
JSPWiki PPMC and the Incubator PMC voted to add a new committer, Harry
Metske, to the team.

All LGPL dependencies have now been cleaned away from the code base, and all
the code is now accounted for, either under individual CLAs, corporate CCLAs
or SGAs. The cleanup did unfortunately mean that some bits of the codebase
needed to be re-implemented under the Apache license, delaying the work.

JSPWiki 2.8.0 has entered the testing cycle with an JSPWiki 2.8.0 alpha
build available to users and developers. This is not an incubator release as
such, but is released through the old mechanism so that we can postpone the
switch to the org.apache.jspwiki package structure until 3.0.

The API development for 3.0 has also been started in the SVN and wiki.

Graduation is not on the horizon yet. The code base is not yet migrated to
use the org.apache package naming and there has not been an official
incubator release yet.


=== JSecurity ===

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

JSecurity has been incubating since June 2008.

The project has kicked off with some basic infrastructure now in place.

Mailing lists have been set up.

The svn repository is ready for code.

The JIRA project is set up.

The initial committers have sent ICLA's and all accounts have been created.

Discussion is underway as to migration of the existing code into the Apache
repository. There is an existing code base with users that will need to have
releases and maintenance while the project is incubating.

PMC comments:
  * jukka: JSecurity status page is missing


=== Lucene.Net ===

IPMC reviews: jukka

Lucene.Net is a source code, class-per-class, API-per-API and algorithmatic
port of the Java Lucene search engine to the C# and .NET platform utilizing
Microsoft .NET Framework.  Lucene Indexes created with Java / C# Lucene are
cross compatible.

Lucene.Net has been incubating since April 2006.

Development on Lucene.Net is back with renewed interest and commitment from
a number of new folks.  Currently, work is underway to port Java Lucene
2.3.1 to the .NET platform.  In addition, we are looking to add new
committers to the project based on their contribution.


=== Qpid ===

Qpid is an enterprise messaging broker which implements the AMQP protocol.
It has been incubating since 2006-08-27.

News:

 * A new release timetable and source management process was agreed on
qpid-dev
 * We're completing our mid-term evaluations of our two GSoC students
 * Continuing to attract new contributers, hopefully a more rapid and
reliable release schedule will help
 * Prototype forrest-based website has comitted to svn to replace the
existing confluence-backed one

Issues before graduation:
 * PPMC diversity needs to be improved


=== RCF ===

RCF is a rich component set for JSF which supports AJAX. We are in the
process of analyzing and removing undesired dependencies of our code to be
compliant in the OpenSource world. Incubating since: May 2007.

The project sources have not yet been committed to Apache svn. We have some
internal (oracle) discussion about migration for our existing customers,
since the code-base is already used inside the company.

Issues before graduation:

 * Bring the sources to Apache
 * build a community around the code


=== Sanselan ===

Sanselan has been in incubation since September 2007.

Sanselan is a pure-java image library for reading and writing a variety of
image formats.

The community hasn't grown much in the past three months. There continues to
be only one active committer.

There was work on EXIF metadata read/write support and a bug in the
implementation was discussed on the dev aliaas.

Builds outside Apache have been made but no official Apache release has been
created yet.

Barriers to graduation continue to be diversity, size of the community,
overall activity, and lack of a release from Apache.


=== Tika ===

Apache Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and
structured text content from various documents using existing parser
libraries. Tika entered incubation on March 22nd, 2007.

Community

  * Tika community remains relatively small, with just a handful of active
members

Development

  * Work towards Tika 0.2 continues, Chris Mattman has volunteered to be the
release manager

Issues before graduation:

  * Increase the size and diversity of the community (or graduate into a
Lucene subproject?)


=== Thrift ===

Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services
development. Thrift allows you to define data types and service interfaces
in a simple definition file. Taking that file as input, the compiler
generates code to be used to easily build RPC clients and servers that
communicate seamlessly across programming languages.

Incubating since May 2008

Status:
 * The SVN repository has been moved to Apache.
 * Mailing lists and JIRA have been set up.
 * Have 9 committers (6.5 from Facebook, 2.5 not from Facebook).
 * Adapted to the JIRA workflow.
 * Some best practices around use of Git have been developed. Documentation
and further discussion required.
 * Significant rework of the Ruby bindings completed and committed.

Plans:
 * Improve (wiki) documentation.
 * Complete a release cycle plan. (What/when/how defines the release of a
version?)
 * Document and elaborate best practices of Git as a contribution tool.
(Background: we are very happy with the way Git worked for us before
incubation, and we want to find a way to make it continue to work within the
Apache Way).
 * Finish rounding up Software Grant forms.


=== 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:

    * New Releases: Version 2.2.2 of the base framework and an add-on
package of annotators, plus a simple server for serving the results of
running UIMA Annotators as a web service
    * 3 other components, the Asynchronous Scale-out support (which uses
Apache ActiveMQ), a HotFix for the base 2.2.2, and a new CAS Editor, are
currently up for a release vote on general@i.a.o list.
    * New sandbox annotators were added that support OpenCalais, a new web
service that does annotations.
    * Information from a UIMA Workshop held at LREC in Marrakesh, Morocco,
was added to our website; see http://incubator.apache.org/uima/lrec08.html
    * One user got UIMA to run on the Apache Hadoop infrastructure, and
posted a how-to guide on the UIMA Wiki.
    * 3 new parts are being incorporated into the Sandbox with software
grants: A Common Feature Extractor useful for extracting features from CASes
to use as training data in machine learning algorithms, a Concept Mapper - a
general dictionary style lookup annotator which may be eventually combined
with another dictionary annotator, and a Cas Viewer Eclipse plug-in tool,
which may be combined with the Cas Editor work.

Items to complete before graduation:

    * We still need to attract more new committers.

Community:

    * We continue to do outreach to attract new contributors, which may
become committers. We hope that the release of the Annotator Package and the
upcoming release of UIMA-AS will help.

IPMC comments:
  * Looking at the Jira contribution reports of the past few releases we see
quite a few contributors who've submitted issues and patches. It looks like
you've already attracted a number of people and need to evaluate/vote on
them as Committers.


=== RAT ===

Incubating since November 2007.  RAT is an auditing tool for automated
checking of compliance with ASF requirements (e.g., licensing).

 * Work has continued on ''scan'' a utility that audits distribution
directories on www.apache.org and create reports on any changes. This should
be complete soon.
 * Ross Gardler contributed a significant contribution supporting the
optional updating of headers. This is a major improvement over the ad-hoc
scripts used in the past.
 * Work continued rationalising the organisation of the codebase



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