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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
