Status report for the Apache Incubator Project ================================================
Since the last report to the Board, Lenya has become ready to fly the nest; and new projects such as Agila, Derby, JackRabbit and iBATIS have begun Incubation. Infrastructure bottlenecks continue to effect the Incubator. I say this without pointing fingers, since as a member of the Infrastructure Team, I am one of the people responsible for being or removing those bottlenecks. It is simply that we can create a rash of requests for project resources, and we (the Infrastructure Team) are short-staffed. One thing that should help will be improved scripts for mailing list creation. Hopefully, we will have some time at the Hack-a-thon to work those tools. Licensing and other IP related issues were reported as an on-going topic of discussion in the last report, at which time I mentioned that it would help to have some legal resource(s) participating with the Incubator. IP issues have come up this quarter that make it even more imperative that we have sufficient legal resources working with the Incubator, and the ASF in general, to address IP issues. - 0 - The list of projects in the Incubator is at http://incubator.apache.org/projects/. Here are the STATUS reports from the PPMCs that have sent one in. Status report from the Directory PPMC ====================================== Our last report was posted here: http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/[EMAIL PROTECTED] .org&msgNo=3919 Since then we have ... o Vetted all IP issues within the project, namely where Snacc4J was concerned. Snickers, the Snacc4J replacement subproject, now supports BER and, in a branch maintained by Alan Cabrera, DER as well. Alan Cabrera has been progressing on his ASN.1 compiler but for the time being we have hand coded LDAP stubs. We have also integrated the new Snickers based LDAP provider as the default BER codec for the ldap-common project. This is a major step for us on the path toward exiting the incubator. o We have retrofitted the old LDAPd code base with the newly modified ldap-common code along with Snickers. This primitive precursor to Eve now runs as it did while at sourceforge however there are no IP issues with this functional server. Users can now kick the tires on an LDAP server that works. We however see this server as more of a demo rather than the real deal which will be Eve. o We have also made progress on another major aspect that demonstrates the viability of this project: building community. BTW, all new committers have signed and submitted their CLAs which are on file and software grants were submitted where appropriate. We have added three new committers to the project of which two are still active. - Trustin Lee joined us to work on the frontend networking code and is making progress adding UDP support to the new SEDA subproject. He will be continuing to work on making Eve's front end code serve as a gateway/proxy server to other LDAP servers soon. - Enrique Rodriguez became a committer as well and is working on the new integrated Kerberos server which plugs into Eve for network authentication. He is also persuing the goal of writing wrappers for Eve to embed Eve into OSGi containers. - Niclas Hedman became a commiter and started work on decoupling Eve's backend from Merlin, however some Avalon commitments have taken his time. o We have begun to pull the backend subsystem out of the sandbox: this is almost complete. A new schema subsystem design has been added while making the move. I have also removed all depenencies on Avalon and Merlin while maintaining the wrappers for Merlin. o Vincent continues to maintain Janus and is getting into some of the LDAP code base while writing unit test cases for them. Vincent is also working on getting all projects rigged into Gump. o We added two new subprojects. The first is called the SEDA framework. It is basically the LDAP frontend networking code with all LDAP dependencies removed so it can run any protocol. In fact it can run multiple protocols on the same plumbing. This is what Trustin is working on most of all. The second subproject is a Kerberos server that Enrique and I had been working on just toying with from within Eve but it wound up being something very attractive so we added it to our project rather than leaving it out there. We don't expect these projects to stay under the directory umbrella forever. We feel this way especially since SEDA can be reused anywhere a Java based protocol server is needed and the Kerberos server can run in stand alone mode one day. Until then we are comfortable having them here indefinately. o On the Naming subproject front, Phil Steitz has integrated Naming with Gump. Phil has been very busy in jakarta-commons working on getting an excellent new addition, the commons math project, out the door. Meanwhile he has been supporting inquiries about Naming and Jira issues posted on it. Conclusions and goals ... [We] are doing really well and are very close to our goals. Perhaps before ApacheCon or by the next status report at the latest we should have all of Eve's parts up and running. Meanwhile we're growing the community and getting more comfortable working together to support our code base. More people are contacting us about various directory subprojects than before so ... if we build it they will come. Status report for Beehive ======================================== Status file is up to date; see http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/public/trunk/site-author/projects/ beehive.cwiki, or http://incubator.apache.org/projects/beehive.html when site is regenerated) Code & Infrastructure - initial code drop was made in mid-July. Ongoing development is very active. - over the last three months, we've set up svn, jira, the web site and a wiki. - we're just starting to make more use of jira. - docs and tutorials have been recently contributed Legal - all code shows ASF copyright notice. - software grant, individual CLAs, and corporate CLAs, are in place for all active committers (one initial committer has no account while we wait for his employer to complete review of CLA and CCLA) Community - Web services metadata subproject has participation from key members of Axis community; however, NetUI and Controls subprojects are still primarily driven by BEA employees. We expect this to begin to change after getting out an initial release for the community to experiment with and digest. We have several ApacheCon presentations that we also hope will invite more non-BEA developers to be actively involved. Release Plans - The community has decided to cut a pre-1.0 release out for ApacheCon. This release will follow the incubation release rules requiring a) incubator disclaimer in README and from any download links, b) filename to include 'incubating', and c) ppmc vote (providing the incubator pmc approval since all interested incubator pmc members should be on the beehive ppmc mailing list. - We've also had a generic release plan proposed and discussed. Also work has started on a roadmap document to make it easier for new developers to get the big picture and figure out where they can help. Status report for MyFaces ======================================== All needed CLAs are on file. A code grant is in transit. Accounts for the committers have been created. Mailing lists are created. Committers are subscribed. The Jira setup for the project is being finalized. The project incubator page is created. Committers are preparing the SourceForge CVS for import to Apache. One account's credentials were lost in transit (grantsmith). Request to root@ to resend the credentials to an alternate address was made 14/Oct/2004. Status report for iBATIS ======================================== All needed CLAs are on file. Code grants are in transit. Accounts for the committers are created. Mailing lists are created. Committers are subscribing. The Jira setup for the project is being finalized. The project incubator page is created. Committers are preparing the SourceForge CVS and third-party SVN for import to Apache. Status report for JackRabbit ======================================== The Jackrabbit project has completed all of the Incubator checklist items in terms of moving to Apache and getting the IP transfer done. With the help of Maven, we have a full website set up at http://incubator.apache.org/jackrabbit/ with a few link bugs due to the svn/viewcvs integration. Our big task from now to graduation is to get the community more involved in development, planning features, integrating with some of the DB projects, and scoping out interesting applications to build on top of the interface. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]