Incubator 2006Q1 Status Report to the ASF Board

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

Status report for the Apache Incubator Project
================================================

The Incubator continues to see good progress in a number of projects and
their communities.

Several items of note from this past quarter:

  We have had some discussion regarding the rate of growth, how to manage
it,
  how to ensure proper oversight.  We have not finalized any policy changes,
  but should do so shortly.  There is a sometimes not-so-subtle- tension
  between oversight and nimbleness, and we're trying to give as much of the
  latter as possible without sacrificing the former.

  We have also had a discussion regarding importing external codebases, with
  the conclusion that where possible, we DO want to import the entire
history.
  This will require some help from Infrastructure to help us swizzle the
  imported authors into some canonical format that won't collide with our
  ASF author namespace.

  People are unhappy with the state of building the web site.  There are two
  possible paths: switching our content to anakia format, or improvement in
  the usability of Forrest.  Which path we take will depend upon the energy
  invested by those who want to help effect the change.

  Jean T. Anderson has helped to revise the Incubator Guidelines, although
  we will have to continue the process.

                           - 0 -

The list of projects in the Incubator is at
http://incubator.apache.org/projects/.  Here are the STATUS reports from the
PPMCs.  The drafts were collected at
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/IncubatorBoardReport2006Q1.  Axion never
began Incubation, despite having been approved by the DB PMC, and will
likely be removed from the list in this quarter.  AltRMI, FTPServer, Tobago
and WSRP4J failed to provide quarterly reports.  Several projects below have
graduated, and are noted as such, but until they participate by updating
their Incubator documents to indicate that fact, I will continue to ping
them.  PMCs must help to maintain the content for which they are
responsible, or we will never be able to scale.

AltRMI has gained no traction, and is likely to leave the Incubator to go
elsewhere.

FTPServer has added two new Committers, and we see continued activity to
revitalize a once dormant project.

I addressed the e-mail delivery problem I mentioned in the last quarterly
report by adding myself to the allow list for every PMC mailing list.

Projects


ActiveMQ

The full status of incubation is at
http://wiki.apache.org/geronimo/ActiveMQ_Incubation. In summary we're most
of the way through incubation now, things have been progressing very well;
the code is clean and using only Apache-compliant libraries, it has the
correct copyright notices and is in the org.apache.activemq namespace and is
generally working well now. We've got the software grants sorted and most
developers have their CLAs on file and accounts created (we've a few more to
do once we know the CLAs are on file).

We've voted on a milestone release which should go out soon once we've
figured out the practicalities of doing an incuabtor milestone release. Our
main outstanding issue now is creating the full website at Apache - which
should be done in the next week or two - for now there is a simple home
page.


Apollo

Has already graduated.


Agila

Project is moving along with an interested core continuing to work on the
software. Progress is still slow in terms of community building. Recent
additions to the incubator in areas of SOA such as Tuscany, ServiceMix,
Celtix etc offer an opportunity for Agila's workflow and BPEL
implementations.


Axion

*HAS YET TO START, AND WILL LIKELY BE REMOVED*


AltRMI

* NO REPORT PROVIDED *


Felix

Mostly a quarter of contributions and new committers that came with them:

  Domoware Contribution
  HttpService Contribution
  WireAdmin Contribution
  M2 plugin and archetype for OSGi projects completed

Organized repository structure

R4 released and ASL compatible

...

Might want to list the new committers here:

Rob Walker

...


FtpServer

* NO REPORT PROVIDED *


Graffito

Graffito has nicely grown recently with activity encouraged by the final
release of Jetspeed 2.0 and good progress made on the JCR support though
Jackrabbit.

We've just added a new committer :

Alexandru Popescu

and some existing Portals committers also actively contributing to the
integration of Graffito with Portals.


Harmony

Harmony project has moved out of it's initial phase in which it formalized
contribution and other governance issues and has now accepted two major
class library code contributions, one from IBM and one from Intel. Work
continues on those two codebases, with topics ranging from bug fixing,
enhancements, as well as other topics such as how to organize test framework
and documentation.

Two releases of snapshots are imminent, one of a basic VM implementation
(JCHEVM) and one of the current classlibrary. We are doing this to make it
easier for users to work with the software.

Our focus in the upcoming quarter is to continue our emphasis on community
building through adding new committers and expaning the scope of our
activities to include other kinds of committers (test, documentation, qa...)
and continue to solicit donations to our codebase as well.


Hermes

Has already graduated.


Jackrabbit

Jackrabbit added four new committers to the project this quarter:

 Serge Huber
 Felix Meschberger
 Brian Moseley
 Angela Schreiber

in recognition of their outstanding and sustained contributions to the
project. Jukka Zitting has volunteered to be the RM for our first set of
incubating releases. We plan to seek graduation from incubator as soon as we
have a track record for a successful release vote.


JuiCE

A few more people are interested from WSS4J and XML-Security projects. We
are trying to formalize a plan to revive this project. Werner (from wss4j)
has patches in his sandbox, we are working to get him commit privileges. We
have received a certificate from SUN for signing the juice jar so that it
can be dropped in just like any other JSSE provider's jar.


log4net

The log4net project is still in incubation, but it is active. The Logging
Services PMC has elected Rob Grabowski ( rgrabowski@apache.org) as a new
committer. This would brings the number of active committers to 4, helping
meet incubator exit criteria.

The log4net committers are working on compatibility with the .NET 2.0
releases from Microsoft and Mono.


log4php

Some minor bug fixes committed.

Added new php5 classes to start coding log4php using the new php5 object
model.


Lucene4c

Lucene4c is stalled for the time being. I (Garrett Rooney) simply don't have
the time to work on it, and nobody else has jumped up and started
contributing. If there's some official way to move it to a "dormant" state
until such time as someone feels motivated to work on it again I'd be in
favor of that. (added by Otis Gospodnetic on behalf of Garret Rooney)


mod_ftp

Work is progressing on folding the mod_ftp build system into the normal,
generic Apache 2 build environment. Additional logging and debugging were
added to the present codebase. Creation of the test suite is also
continuing.


Muse

Has already graduated.


Roller

JDO implementation started by Craig Russell (
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/roller/trunk/sandbox/jdobackend/).
When finished, should be able to replace Hibernate.

1.3, 2.0, 2.0.1 released at rollerweblogger.org.

New committer added: Matt Schmidt.

FindBugs dependency removed (LGPL).


ServiceMix

The full status of incubation is at
http://wiki.apache.org/geronimo/ServiceMix_Incubation. In summary we're most
of the way through incubation now, things have been progressing very well;
the code is clean and using mostly Apache-compliant libraries (more on that
below), it has the correct copyright notices and is in the
org.apache.servicemix namespace and is generally working well now. We've got
the software grants sorted and most developers have their CLAs on file and
accounts created (we've a few more to do once we know the CLAs are on file).

Our main outstanding issues are now

creating the website at Apache (should be done in the next week or so)

getting a definitive answer on if we are allowed to use CDDL software such
as the JAXB2 Reference Implementation. We have so far not seen a definitive
answer anywhere and so are continuing to use it unless we are given
guidenence that we should not.


stdcxx

Stdcxx status report for the calendar quarter ending in 12/2005:

This is the second quarterly report for stdcxx.

The stdcxx community has spent the last three months working toward version
4.1.3 of the project. The major accomplishments thus far include the
completion of the test suite driver (STDCXX-4), the migration of a large
number (but not all) of stdcxx tests from the Rogue C++ Standard Library
test suite to this driver and to the ASF Subversion repository (STDCXX-4),
and the creation of a Windows configuration and build infrastructure
(STDCXX-5, STDCXX-13).

The successful completion of these objectives marks an important milestone
for the stdcxx project. To facilitate the migration of existing users of the
Rogue Wave C++ Standard Library to stdcxx, the stdcxx community is currently
in the process of releasing version 4.1.3 of the project. This release has
been scheduled to coincide with the release of the Rogue Wave C++ Standard
Library 4.1.3 on which stdcxx is based. A vote to release stdcxx 4.1.3 is
under way on stdcxx-dev.

In other news, the stdcxx PPMC recently voted to extend an offer of
committership to Anton Pevtsov. Anton is the author of the Windows build
infrastructure and his help with porting the test suite over the last few
months has been essential. In addition, in preparation for graduation and
the forming of a PMC, the stdcxx PPMC has started to discuss expanding its
membership from the current 5 (including 3 mentors) to involve other active
committers.

Going forward, the most important goals of the growing stdcxx community
continue to be to increase the visibility of the project and further
increase the number as well as diversity of its users, contributors, and
committers, finish porting the stdcxx test suite, and implement a complete
test harness for the project to facilitate automated nightly testing. Other
goals include expanding the set of platforms to Apple Darwin and other
BSD-based operating systems, enhancing support for the C++ Standard Library
extensions described in the (Draft) Technical Report on C++ Library
Extensions.

Martin Sebor


Synapse

The Synapse project is progressing well. We have met the target
functionality for an M1 release, have voted on it and hope to release it
during January. We have had a number of votes and hold a regularly scheduled
IRC chat that is well attended by a core team of contributors. The M1
release offers a useful set of functionality, has a codebase that is 100%
new code developed by the community under the CLA and ASL2. The release
offers users the ability to route, transform and log web service messages
passing thru the Synapse intermediary. It utilises a number of existing
Apache projects including Axis2.

There is a simple Wiki based website for Synapse documentation. We are
improving the junit test coverage and javadoc in an ongoing basis.

The community is diverse but most of the code has come from members of two
companies. There is however active participation from a few other companies
on the mailing list and in the IRC chats. We expect to nurture that more and
expect to see increased participation as awareness grows with the upcoming
M1 release.

The project aims to join as a sub-project of the Web Services project and
attracts participation from committers of Axis2 in particulare. We are
tracking our progress at http://wiki.apache.org/ws/Synapse/IncubationStatus.


Tobago

* NO REPORT PROVIDED *


TSIK

Interest is waning a bit. We have not been able to hook TSIK onto any of the
dependency chains (example Axis->WSS4J) that we have. We may have to
seriously consider the worst case scenario of stopping incubation.


Tuscany

Project is just starting incubation. CLAs are on file for the initial
committers. A CCLA has been received for the initial contributions of C++
and Java implementations and the code has been imported into SVN. Activity
is starting on the development mailing list and includes new contributors to
the project.


WADI

WADI is in the very early phases of incubation, working through issues
related to the transfer from Codehaus to the ASF. Progress has been slow due
to holiday break as well as engineering and social issues surrounding the
Geronimo 1.0 release, for which there is a strong community interest in
having WADI properly working and integrated.

There is focued mentor attention in helping this community make the move
from Codehaus to the ASF.


Woden

The WSDL 2.0 processor being developed by this incubator project is
progressing according to the Milestone plan on the Woden web site. We are
still aiming for an initial release around April 2006 and hopefully,
promotion from incubation. M2 delivered December 9th includes most of the
WSDL parsing logic and about one third of the WSDL validation. M3 due
January 20th will complete the parsing logic and most of the validation. Web
site documentation and expansion of the junit test suite are also due in M3.
Other goals of the project will be addressed after M3. So far, the code has
been developed by two committers, both from IBM. M2 was the first code base
suitable for broader participation. We have two potential contributors from
other organizations who have offered help recently and the Woden wiki now
has a list of the main outstanding tasks that need to be completed. We will
be liaising more closely with those potential contributors to expand the
collaboration on the project.

Another key development is that the WSDL 2.0 became a  W3C Candidate
Recommendation on January 6, 2006. We are likely to see increased
participation in Woden and engage in interoperability testing with other
implementations.


WSRP4J

* NO REPORT PROVIDED *


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscribe@incubator.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: general-help@incubator.apache.org