November 2006 Incubator Report

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

The Incubator continues to be very active.

The recent graduation of Harmony has led to a healthy discussion of what
types of votes should be held on which mailing lists.  Ken Coar also
conducted a general review of the STATUS files for current Incubator
projects, which has led to a number of those files being updated, and a
general awareness that there had been some laxity in maintaining them.

Robert Burrell Donkin continues to yeoman work helping to review the IP
status for our projects.  His RAT tool can help to automate some of the
preliminaries, and perhaps we should look at encouraging its use ASF-wide.

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November Reports

=== Abdera ===

Abdera is an implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol and Atom
Syndication Format.

Items to complete before graduation:

 * Continue to expand the community
 * Handle any legal issues related to crypto code

Community:

 * Added Ugo Cei as a committer/PPMC member
 * Decided to work towards a new release Real Soon Now (tm)

Code:

 * Added new code that implements IRI support
 * Tweaked extension API to improve code reuse across parser implementations
 * Implemented more unit tests
 * Added more extensions
 * Added experimental bidirectional character support

=== IVY ===

Ivy is a new incubator podling.

Functionally, Ivy is a tool for managing (recording, tracking,
resolving and reporting) project dependencies.
It is characterized by the following:

1. flexibility and configurability

2. tight integration with Apache Ant

Xavier Hanin, the main author of Ivy, sent the proposal to join the
incubator on October 23d 2006.

The proposal is sponsored by the Ant PMC which voted to sponsor the
entry of Ivy at the Apache Incubator.

Since the proposal, the main actions which have been achieved have
been :

 * creation of the web page http://incubator.apache.org/projects/ivy.html

 * creation of ivy specific mailing lists

 * the CLA of Xavier Hanin has been received by the ASF

 * the CLA of Maarten Coene and the License Grant have not been received
 or processed yet.

The receipt and processing of the License Grant is now the limiting factor
for the next steps, which are the import of the codebase in Subversion and
the import of the bug reports in JIRA.

The people involved with Ivy at present are :

===== Mentors =====

 * Antoine Levy-Lambert
 * Stephane Bailliez
 * Steve Loughran
 * Stefan Bodewig

===== Committers =====

 * Xavier Hanin
 * Maarten Coene


=== Lokahi ===
Lokahi is a management console for Apache httpd and Apache Tomcat.  Lokahi
entered incubation in January 2006.

Top items to resolve before graduation:
 * Grow the community.  It's currently diverse, but fairly small.
 * Go through the release process at least once, issuing Apache-approved
release and making sure all requirements, e.g. LICENSE and NOTICE files, are
met.

The Lokahi project has kept on chugging along, incorporating numerous
contributed patches and focusing on code quality, improved MySQL support,
and and enhanced support for late version Tomcat 5.5 containers.


=== Roller ===

Roller 3.0 work complete - We reported on the new featues of Roller
3.0 in the last status report. Roller 3.0 is now in production at
several sites and is ready for release. We are currently testing RC4
and hoping to release shortly.

Roller 3.1 nearing completion, RC1 sometime in the next week - features
include:
- Full support for tagging weblog entries, displaying a tag cloud,
viewing blog pages by tag and providing dynamic RSS/Atom feeds based
on tags.
- Theme encapsulation: when you customize a theme the resources are
now copied into your file upload area - making custom themes
independent so they won't break when new versions of themes are
deployed.
- Replaced RTE editor with more sophisticated Xinha WYSIWYG editor

Ready for graduation? - our licensing issues are behind us. We no
longer ship any LGPL components and three separate effort exist to
replace our Hibernate dependency with a non LGPL solution (using JDO,
JPA and iBatis). Apparently, all we need to do to graduate is to build
up our web presence within the incubator and migrate our bug database.

Community building efforts - Earlier efforts are bearing fruit: IBM Is
now contributing regularly to development via committer Elias Torres,
who implemented weblog entry tagging support in Roller 3.1. Dave
Johnson presented is Roller "primer for new users and contributors"
talk at ApacheCon US 2006 in Austin, TX.


=== Solr ===
Solr is a Lucene based search server supporting XML/HTTP APIs, faceted
search, highlighting, caching and replication.  Solr entered incubation in
January 2006.

Top items to resolve before graduation:
 * Go through the process of making a release
 * Continue building a diverse community

Community
 * Solr continues to see increased adoption and very positive feedback and
contributions from a growing community: 195 solr-user subscribers and 95
solr-dev.
 * Patches from 10 different non-CNET contributors have been committed.
 * ApacheCon US 2006: "Faceted Searching with Apache Solr" session, Solr
incubator talk, Lucene BOF
 * Other Presentations like "Subversion and Solr - Your Next Content
Repository?" and "Solr and Faceted Search"
 * Integration packages (such as acts_as_solr maintained by others at
rubyforge)

Code
 * New built-in simple faceted search capabilities without the need for
custom code.
 * Output XML via XSL transformer, compressed fields, improved parameter
handling, more querying options and performance optimizations.

----
=== stdcxx ===

Stdcxx status report for the calendar quarter ending in 11/2006.

__Project Summary'':__

Stdcxx  is  a portable  implementation  of  the  C++ Standard  Library
conforming to the ISO/IEC 14882 international standard for C++.

__In incubation since'':__ 5/19/2005.

__Issues to resolve before graduation{{{}}}:__

Increase committer base and diversity.

__Community'':__

The project  has 11 committers  (excluding mentors).  Of these  6 have
been  (or were at  some point) active. The diversity of  the committer
community is 54%.   During the last three months  the stdcxx community
has added one new committer, Andrew Black.

__Activity'':__

The stdcxx-dev list has 52  subscribers and averages 4.79 post per day
since inception.  The stdcxx-user list  has 33 subscribers with a mean
of 0.34 posts per day  since inception. The stdcxx-commits list has 15
subscribers and 2.09 posts per day. There are 301 issues in the stdcxx
bug tracking database. Of these 120 are closed or resolved.

__Code''__

The most  recent release  of stdcxx, version  4.1.3, was  published in
January 2006. The next  release, tentatively numbered 4.2, is expected
to  be published  in  the March  2007  timeframe. All code is licensed
under the Apache license version 2.

----
=== Synapse ===

Accepted into the Incubator August 2005.

Synapse is a robust, lightweight implementation of a highly scalable and
distributed service mediation framework based on Web services specifications

We are making good progress on these three issues:
 1. Increase mailing list discussions - mailing list discussions up
significantly
 1. Growth of community - getting some good input from users. There was a
good session at ApacheCon, and also 3 sessions on Synapse at the Colorado
Software Summit with good attendance and feedback at all three.
 1. Diversity of committers - we have diversity factor 3 currently and
patches/contributions from at least two others

Synapse development continues apace, have agreed a release plan for a 0.90
release and are working to get that out in the near future.
There has been some discussion with the Jakarta HttpComponents people to use
their upcoming NIO and async http code within Synapse (post the 0.90
release).
In October a new committer, Ruwan Linton, was voted in. A Synapse blog has
been started and there have been presentations at Apachecon US and at the
Colorado Software Summit.

=== Tuscany ===

Tuscany provides infrastructure for developing service-oriented
applications.

Tuscany is still focusing on community building. We added four new
committers, Venkat Krishnan, Luciano Resende, Ignacio Silva-Lepe and Rajith
Attapattu. We also have others actively contributing, particularly in the
areas of Declarative DAS, BPEL, JMS, SCA Policy and OSGi integration.

In addition, we have had a lot of development activity:

     * C++ M2 was released
     * A DAS M2 release candidate was submitted to the IPMC for vote and is
currently underway
     * A SDO M2 release candidate was submitted to the IMPMC for vote and is
currently underway
     * A Java M2 release candidate is currently being worked on and will
hopefully be submitted soon to the IPMC for vote

Our top two issues to resolve are:

1. Increasing community diversity. A significant number of committers work
for one vendor. We are making efforts to attract individual contributors in
addition to normal avenues (helping on lists with questions, etc.) including
presenting at conferences (ApacheCon) and webinars.

2. Preparation for graduation needs to start including a discussion of what
timeframe is appropriate



=== UIMA ===

Accepted into the Incubator 10/06.

UIMA is a component framework for the analysis of unstructured content such
as text, audio and video.

There was some discussion on incubator-general about changing the name of
the project to something that's not an acronym and does not have a history
outside of Apache.  The final consensus though was that the arguments for
keeping the name outweighed the ones for changing, so we're sticking with
it.

After the naming discussion was settled, we started getting the
infrastructure set up:

 * Mailing lists set up
 * SVN repository created
 * Apache, SVN, Jira accounts for committers (mostly done)
 * Initial code drop checked in after receipt of software grant, Apache
license headers inserted
 * Initial version of website created

Our priorities for the next few weeks:

 * Finish infrastructure set up, get settled in with Apache
 * Work on our (maven2) build
 * Work on our website, document our build etc.
 * Start directing our existing user base to Apache to attract some early
adopters
 * Discuss ways to attract new committers

=== Wicket ===
Web development framework focusing on pure OO coding,
making the creation of new components very easy. Wicket entered the
incubator in October 2006.

==== October report ====

Top three items to resolve -

 * Remove a LGPL date picker component from Wicket-extensions
 * Work out how community is going to manage releases (e.g should we release
current maintenance branches at SourceForge? 1.2.3->SF, 1.3->ASF, 2.0->ASF)
 * Settle into ASF context more

Community aspects:
 * All bar one of Wicket's SourceForge committers have come over to Apache
 * About to vote in our first new committer since starting incubation
 * PPMC is starting to explore setting up project guidelines, for example
should committer votes be done in private/public; should all committers be
on PPMC or not)

Code aspects:
 * Working on completing 1.2.3 release - last release to be done at
SourceForge - before 1.3 development starts. 1.3 likely an ASF release
 * Work continues steadily on 2.0, also expected to be an ASF release

Licensing:
 * Need to remove/resolve a LGPL dependency in Wicket-extensions on a date
picker component

Infrastructure:
 * All ICLAs are signed, all accounts created, and all karma granted (still
need to get ICLA from one chap who didn't come to ASF, and for other
contributors that may need one)
 * Subversion repository successfully imported into ASF repo by Graham
Rooney (many thanks). All development work is now taking place in ASF repo.
 * dev, private and commits email lists moved to incubator. All development
work is happening on these lists
 * user list remains on SourceForge for the time being (while development
settles in. May move over to ASF once we've done a real ASF release).
 * Wicket Wiki ( http://www.wicket-wiki.org.uk/wiki/index.php) has been
ported across to Confluence ( http://cwiki.apache.org/WICKET/)
 * JIRA has been set up and bugtracking is now happening there. A
SourceForge->JIRA importer has been written, but not yet executed on Wicket
issues.

==== November report ====

Top three items to resolve

 * Remove a LGPL date picker component from Wicket-extensions
 * Make the code base license policy compliant
 * Settle into ASF context more

Community aspects:
 * Voted in our first new committer since starting incubation: Alistair Maw
 * Development list gets more activity

Code aspects:
 * Performed Wicket 1.2.3 release at sourceforge.net
 * Work on 1.3 has started
 * Work continues steadily on 2.0
 * 1.3 and 2.0 are marked Apache releases

Licensing:
 * Started work on removing/replacing LGPL date picker component from
extensions
 * Started to replace License headers in source files
 * Discussion on css/javascript/html file license headers. Wicket contains
and distributes many (small) css, javascript and html files that are also
downloaded to the browser. Point of dispute is the fact that the license is
larger than several of the files, and that it increases the download sizes
of resources for all users of Wicket applications.

Infrastructure:
 * Work has started to generate the website using confluence

=== XAP ===
XAP is a declarative framework for building, deploying and maintaining
Ajax-based rich internet applications with the goal of dramatically
simplifying Ajax application development. XAP entered incubation in May
2006.

Top three items to resolve before graduation:

 * Bring the codebase to a level that contributors can make contributions
without significant pain;
 * Create a XAP incubating release with proper packaging and quality
 * Engage a higher level of community activity and contribution

Community
 * Various discussions on the XAP dev list on technical issues such as
application initialization and DOM model;
 * Attended ApacheCon and gave a lightening talk on XAP
 * A session called "Introduction to XAP" was presented at AjaxWorld
Conference and Ajax Experience conference at Boston
 * Various third party expressed interest in learning more about XAP, but
complained that not easy to get infomation and not easy to figure out what
XAP code does.

Code
 * Achieved milestone 3: added more widgets and streamlined initialization
 * Various bug submission and JS unit tests submitted by Trevor Oldak
 * Update demo applications with improved performance
 * Working towards the next milestone: more widgets and some appealing demos
to attract more developers



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