October 2007 Incubator Board Report

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

The Incubator enjoyed another good month.

Tuscany and stdcxx are in the process of graduation votes and preparation of
TLP proposals.  Ivy graduated into Ant.  TripleSoup and JUICE are being put
into a dormant status.  "Pig" is *just* coming in, and "Imperius" should
enter Incubation shortly.  The RAT analysis tool is also being proposed for
Incubation.  The first reports for Sanselan, Sling and JSPWiki are included
in this month's report.  Lokahi isn't due to report this month, but since
there has been some on-going concern, I want to note that there has been
*some* uptick in activity, with a focus on removing the dependency on
Oracle.

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

=== CXF ===

Project name - Apache CXF

Description - SOA enabling framework, web services toolkit

Date of entry - August 2006

Items to resolve before graduation:
  * Diversity - Active committers are mostly IONA people. We did vote in two
new independent committers and Dan Diephouse now works for an IONA
competitor, so some progress is being made.


Community aspects:
  * Voted in Benson Margulies due to excellent work in several areas of the
code, but specifically in the Aegis and XFire migration things.
  * Voted in Glen Mazza due to excellent work cleaning up various parts of
the code, reviewing everyones commits, updating docs, etc....
  * Released 2.0.1-incubator and 2.0.2-incubator.
  * Started a discussion to talk about Graduation
([http://www.nabble.com/Graduating.....-tf4231363.html#a12038088 link]) but
the discussion turned more to how to increase diversity when Jim J.
expressed concerns about that.
  * The cxf-user mail list traffic has tripled since June, and the Chinese
language list (http://groups.google.com/group/cxf-zh) is now at over 60
people.  Many new users are participating.  However, cxf-dev traffic has
remained constant except for a HUGE spike (2.4x normal) in September.

Code aspects:
  * Released 2.0.1-incubator and 2.0.2-incubator - These were bug fixes from
2.0, but some minor new features were added.
  * Started discussing a roadmap for a 2.0.3-incubator release (bug fixes)
as well as a 2.1 release. (http://incubator.apache.org/cxf/roadmap.html)


=== FtpServer ===

Project name - Apache FtpServer

Description - Java based FtpServer

Date of entry - March, 2003

Progress since last report

* Only minor development efforts since last report due to commiter time
limitations, mostly focused on fixing bug reports and feature requests which
are coming in at a steady pace. More people seems to use FtpServer now that
activity is steady on the project.
Voted in a new commiter, Clint Foster. He is currently in progress of
setting up his account and get going with the practical details.
* Niclas Hedhman added as a much needed mentor to the project.
* Continous builds are in the works using the vmbuild1 server, with the aim
of producing snapshots which has been repeatably asked for

Top three items to resolve

1. Growth of community - we still need more active members
2. Getting snapshot builds published automatically by the build server
(minor details left to finish)
3. Getting s stable release out, need more active members to have good
review
   Getting a build server in place so that we can generate snapshots, they
have been requested by several people.


=== Ivy ===

Description - Ivy is a dependencies management tool mostly used in
combination with Apache Ant

Date of entry - October 23rd, 2006
Date of exit - October 11th, 2007

Item resolved:
  1. We have made research for Ivy trademark

Community aspects:
   * We have defined some plan for for the 2.0 release
   * We have seen new contributors on our dev mailing list (some ant
commiters, and some others)
   * Gilles Scokart has join the PPMC
   * We have voted to join ant as subproject
   * Ant TLP has voted to accept ivy as subproject

Code aspects:
   * Second release done
   * The coding activities has been been more limited, but our development
efforts still focus on the integration with maven repository, bug fixing,
and tutorials enhancements.


=== JSPWiki ===

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

Mailing lists have been set up and subscriptions from the previous
mailing
lists are being transferred.

The svn repository is ready for code.

The JIRA project is set up.

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


=== RCF ===

RCF is a rich component set (ajax-style) for JSF. The RCF Wiki has been
created and all committers are now set. We started discussion on the
OpenSource efforts, how to manage it, since we need to provide a migration
path for current users. We are waiting for an import of a current code drop
into the repository.

=== Lucene.Net ===

Project name - Apache Lucene.Net

Description - Lucene.Net is a source code, class-per-class, API-per-API and
algorithmtic port of the Java Lucene search engine to the C# and .NET
platform utilizing Microsoft .NET Framework.

Date of entry - April, 2006

Progress since last report - We have seen good activities in the past three
months on the mailing list (both the dev and user).  Unlike in the past,
where I was taking care of all fixes in the code in preparation to a
release, I have seen considerable patches submitted by the community to
resolve open issues in Lucene.Net 2.1 work.  This is very encouraging and I
would like to suggest to the community to vote on adding one of the active
patch submitter as a committer.

Code aspects - Code is very stable with current "beta" version of 2.1 which
we expect to release in the next few weeks.

Community aspects - We have good followers and the past three months have
shown good commitments for submitting patches.

Top three items to resolve -

1. Growth of community - while this has been improving, we still need more
active members, specially those who submit patches.

2. Release Apache Lucene.Net 2.1 and start working on 2.2 / 2.3.

3. Vote in a new committer.

=== Qpid ===

The Apache Qpid Project provides an open and interoperable, multiple
language implementations of the Advanced Messaged Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
specification

Date of entry to the Incubator : 2006-09

Top three items to resolve before graduation

We aborted the M2 release vote mid way due to some key bugs. We are building
new RC's and will re-vote. Once M2 is out we will seek graduation.

Resolved:

1. There don't seem to be any major issues currently, or items that need to
be raised. Most notable is that the Qpid community and users have had quite
a lot of debate on code and practices in the last period. Some debates where
quite intense, but all very productive furthering team work and community.

* Any legal, cross-project or personal issues that still need to be
addressed?

>From last report:
The whole project has not gone through release review and the license files
and notices need to be checked for all languages and components.

Done - Legal review was done prior to M2 vote for the full code base. M2
vote was aborted for key bug, and is being restarted Oct 8th.

* Latest developments.

 * Since entering into incubation we have had one release of the java code
base (M1).
 * We have migrated our java build system from ant to maven.
 * Development has been moving forward. with improvements in memory
footprint management passing the JMS TCK in with the java broker.
 * Addition of .NET client
 * Successfully voted to give 7+ new committers access rights
 * Successfully voted to give a new member contributor rights to cwiki.
 * The creation of the Web site
 * General progress on all code bases
 * Created python test suite
 * Added Ruby language support
 * We have stabilized our M2 release, voted, aborted vote - and re-vote Oct
8th
 * Lots of code and clean up and new functionality
 * Increase in user mail to the point of requesting and creating a user list
 * Requests from other projects to integrate with us
 * Building M3 / V1 if graduated.

* Plans and expectations for the next period?

During the next period, once we have M2 out I believe we will see if we can
graduate.


=== Sanselan ===

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

Mailing lists have been set up. The structure of the project has been
discussed; plans are to use maven using Jackrabbit as a model.

A site was created using Confluence.

The svn repository has had the first code drop. Most of the code from then
original base has been committed.

The JIRA project is set up and the initial code drop was posted for review.

The initial committers have been given access to the repository.


=== Sling ===

Sling is a framework to develop content centric web applications based on
the idea of modularizing the rendering of HTTP resources.

Sling entered incubation on September 5th, 2007.

Community

 * Proper wiki/web page created by Felix Meschberger based on the Apache
Felix setup by Marcel Offermans and Ronald Spierenburg.
 * Juan's committer account has been setup
 * Apache Sling will be present at the ApacheCon US 07 with a Feather Talk.
 * Upcoming will be a discussion on when we should cut a first release.

Software

 * Discusssion is taking place to simplify the current "Component API" and
to remove interfaces which are more or less duplicate to the Servlet API
used and extended by Sling.
 * A "sample" project has been added to show some features of Sling.

Issues before graduation

 * Make an incubating Sling release
 * Grow a more diverse community (so far only commits from Day employees)

Licensing and other issues

 * none

=== Tika ===

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

There have been a number of positive items within Tika during the last few
months. The traffic on the Tika mailing list has increased significantly
(with typically 2, 3 questions, and 1 or 2 commits every day, or every other
day), and there have been a lot of recent inquiries from external projects
wanting to collaborate with Tika (including Aperture, PDFBox and a fellow
developing a JSon library currently hosted at Google code). In addition,
Tika's architecture has become a recent discussion of interest (as we'll see
below).

We recently elected Keith Bennett as a new committer to Tika. Keith has been
spearheading many of the new patches committed to Tika, as well as
participating in discussions about the architecture, and future direction of
the project.

Tika will be represented at the "Fast Feather" track at Apache Con US by
Jukka Zitting. The rest of the community is helping to create the content
for the presentation. The abstract is listed below:

Tika is a new content analysis framework borne from the desire to factor our
commonality from the Apache Nutch search engine framework. Tika provides a
mime detection framework, an extensible parsing framework and metadata
environment for content analysis. Though in its nascent stages, progress on
Tika has recently taken shape and the project is nearing a stable 0.1
release. In this talk, we'll describe the core APIs of Tika and discuss its
use in several distinct domains including search engines, scientific data
dissemination and an industrial setting.


Development

There have been a flurry of JIRA issues and code activity [1] including 47
issues currently in JIRA, with 32 resolved issues, 14 closed issues, and 2
open major/minor issues in progress).

Tika's Parser interface (one of its key components) has just undergone a
major overhaul led by Jukka Zitting, and Chris Mattmann has recently
contributed a MimeType system (with help from fellow Apache Nutch committer
Jerome Charron) to Tika. We also cleaned up and refactored large parts of
the rest of the code (removing references to LuisLite and branding the
project wherever possible with the Tika name), in preparation for an
upcoming 0.1 release.

Chris Mattmann has led an effort to carve out the existing MimeType
detection system in Apache Nutch [2] and replace it with Tika's improved
MimeType detection system. There is a patch sitting in JIRA right now [3],
and barring objections, Nutch will rely on Tika for its MimeType detection
abilities.

Also active recently were committers Bertrand Delacretaz, Sami Siren and
Rida Benjelloun, committing patches and improvements wherever needed.


Issues before graduation

No changes since our last report: the Tika project is still at an early
stage of incubation. We need to continue bringing in the initial codebases
and are targeting an initial incubating release (0.1) probably within the
next month. We also need to work on growing the community and figuring out
how to best interact with external parser projects.


 1. http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA
 2. http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/
 3. http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NUTCH-562


=== TripleSoup ===

TripleSoup is intended to provide an RDF store, tooling to work with that
database, and a REST web interface to talk to that database using SPARQL,
implemented as an apache webserver module.

TripleSoup has voted itself into dormant mode. The main reason the project
did not quite materialize seems to be that we don't have enough people with
sufficient interest, need, and time to make this really take off.


=== 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:

  * Version 2.2 was released 8/2007, our second incubator release.  This one
went without a hitch.
  * We're currently discussing the next release, which will likely be mostly
a bug fix release with only minor new features.

Items to complete before graduation:

  * We still need to attract more new committers.  We're trying to spark
even more activity in the sandbox to get people to contribute.

Community:

  *  We have recently welcomed our first new committer, Jorn Kottman.  Jorn
contributed and continues working on an Eclipse based editor.  He also made
contributions to our build process and design discussions.
  *  There's a good amount of traffic on both the dev and user list.




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