November 2008 Board Overall a good month. A few items of note.
Several of us met with Michael Cote at ApacheCon to discuss the Incubator with him. Bertrand was instrumental in instigating and facilitating the meeting. The most contentious, and it isn't very contentious at that, discussion is regarding the Helenus proposal, which is to incubate an already existing fork of Facebook's Cassandra project, ostensibly because Cassandra is dead from a community perspective, with Facebook being absentee landlords. Because of that, the community has already forked the project, and is looking for a home. Ian Holsman is our point of contact with that community at present, and proposed Incubation. Stonehenge has been accepted for Incubation. From the proposal: "The aim of the Stonehenge project is to develop a set of sample applications to demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols." Kato has been accepted for Incubation. From the proposal: "Kato is a project to develop the Specification, Reference Implementation and Technology Compatibility Kit for JSR 326: Post-mortem JVM Diagnostics API" OpenWebBeans has been accepted for Incubation. From the proposal: "Open Web Beans will be an implementation of the Web Beans Specification which is defined as JSR-299." A number of other proposals are under consideration. Abdera, Buildr, CouchDB and Qpid are in the process of seeking graduation. NMaven is going to go dormant. JvZ apparently wants to move the project out of the ASF entirely. ---------------- = Abdera = Abdera has been incubating since May 2006. It is a framework for building Atom publishing protocol clients and servers. At the time of writing, Abdera is in the process of composing our graduation to TLP proposal for the Incubator PMC. Depending on how quickly that gets done we hope to have a proposal for the board for either the November or December meeting. Other than that progress is steady but slow. We have a continuing stream of minor issues and fixes, and a few relatively new committers who have been taking care of them. There has been little major progress but a fair amount of minor changes and fixes. All in all the project seems healthy and we anxiously await graduation and our next release, which should come soon afterwards. = BlueSky = Bulesky has been incubating since 01-12-2008. It is an e-learning solution designed to help solve the disparity in availability of qualified education between well-developed cities and poorer regions of China. During the past month, we finally clear the legal problem lay in our source code. Agreement achieved that the libstdc++ don't collide with ASL, however, FFMPEG is absolutely vetoed under ASL. So we have to find a subsitute to replace it. Students of the bluesky [EMAIL PROTECTED] are either busy cramming for exams or painstaking coding for an original system. Thus the work at Apache has been greatly delayed. But we still complete several critical things. The first is to eleminate the code which violates ASL from the Bluesky source code. Secondly, we renewed the user manual. Hope it will facilitate people who wanna try our software. Top priorities: *upload our source code to SVN repository. In order to ensure the qualification of our source code under ASL, we will, soon, put our "cleansing version" code on our [EMAIL PROTECTED] and hope people at Apache community to have a double examination. After that we will commit our code to SVN. *Another emergency is to replace FFMPEG. FFMPEG plays a critical role in our software. If proper subsititute can't be found, the progress of our incubating at Apache will be delayed to a large extent. = Buildr = Development We released Buildr 1.3.3 on October 16th, our 4th release in the incubator. Along with bug fixes and minor improvements, this release featured improved code organization for multi-language support. We also reorganized the documentation to have language-specific sections. Community In August Antoine Contal has been accepted as a new commmitter and was subsequently voted in the Buildr PPMC. Traffic on the mailing lists has been steady. A [http://www.nabble.com/Fast-Feather-Talk%3A-Apache-Buildr-td20022541.html Fast Feather talk] about Buildr was given during ApacheCon. Graduation We started discussing graduation in September and requested community feedback on the proposed resolution in October. In November, we initiated the [http://markmail.org/message/4bo627obdp3zdmhe vote from the Incubator PMC] and the vote passed. = Click = Click is a page and component oriented Java web framework. Click has been incubating since July 2008. We have released 1.5 final and are in the process of migrating SVN and JIRA. Tasks completed since October: * Public Wiki has been setup. * Source code have been exported and are currently being migrated to Apache. Top priorities: * Finish SVN migration. * Import issues from existing JIRA. = CouchDB = CouchDB is a distributed document-oriented database system written in Erlang. The project entered incubation on February 12th, 2008. Since the last report in August, we released CouchDB version 0.8.1. We are currently collecting feedback 1.3.2 cleared up some missing/mixed copyright issues that slipped past QA in earlier releases, and as of now we have no outstanding licensing issues. for a 0.9.0 release since trunk has gotten some significant additions: * faster b-tree operations * authentication for Futon, the admin interface * improvements for building CouchDB on BSD and Solaris systems * support for massive numbers of databases on a single node * improved binary attachment handling * multi-key-get and include-docs options for views An initial version of CouchDB's security model is also in the works for the 0.9 release. The project added J Chris Anderson (jchris) to the list of (now five) committers with the approval of the IPMC. A few patches that lead to new features were contributed by non-committers. General feedback, interest and support in and of CouchDB continues to grow. The project is currently asking the IPMC to recommend CouchDB's graduation to the Board. = Droids = Droids is a new Incubator project recently arrived from Apache Labs (end October). It's an intelligent standalone robot framework that allows one to create and extend existing web robots. Things are charging along in Droids. The code has been moved over in SVN, a website setup, JIRA project migrated and a wiki location defined. There is much coding and redesign activity from the initial 3 committers and Thorsten successfully seeded interest in Droids at both BarCamp and FastFeather Talks at ApacheCon US. Now the focus is on evolving the design and building a larger community. = Empire-db = Empire-db is a relational data access layer offering special benefits over other solutions through string-free dynamic query generation, metadata access and improved compile-time safety. Empire-db has been accepted to the incubator in July 2008. Recent activity: In October only a few minor bug fixes and improvements for both the core database component and the Struts2 extensions library have been provided. Still on our list is the maven support for the upcoming 2.0.5 release. Another idea is to provide an example for how to integrate Web-Services in a Web-Application using Empire-db's metadata capabilities. There are also plans for providing integration with Apache Wicket, which could be a new subproject just like the Empire-db Struts2 extensions. This however is a task that would take a few months to develop. Community aspects: In order to increase our community and make people more aware of the capabilities and benefits of Empire-db we have submitted a proposal for a presentation at the Apache Con Europe 2009 in Amsterdam. We are waiting to hear from the conference committee any time soon. = Etch = Etch was accepted into Incubator on the 2 September 2008. Etch is a cross-platform, language- and transport-independent framework for building and consuming network services. The Etch toolset includes a network service description language, a compiler, and binding libraries for a variety of programming languages. Progress has been slow this last month, mainly due to lag in getting the source code into Subversion. We have at least now gotten the stuff into /repos/test and everything looks good and are now waiting for Joe to put it into /repos/asf/incubator/etch. The following tasks are in progress: * Publishing source tree in SVN; INFRA has the subversion repo-dumpfile and we have tested access. * Confluence Wiki for Etch, and once it is setup we will begin migration of the public pages at http://developer.cisco.com/web/cuae/etch to Apache. Our goal is to get back to coding once we have the infrastructure established. = JSecurity = We just have to report that the code base has been imported into the ASF repository, and as it was a long waited move, it's good to have it announced in this monthly report ! = Lokahi = Lokahi did not report, and has had no activity since March. The PMC will investigate whether or not this project should go into a dormant status. = NMaven = NMaven develops plugins and integration for Maven to make building and using .NET languages a first-class citizen in Maven. Incubating since: 2006-11-17 * Slight increase in mailing list traffic * Work has progressed on helping to migrate the previous version to the revised trunk * Discussion of another release * Started to set up a repository on the Maven central repository for .NET artifacts * Presented a brief fast feather talk at ApacheCon, but didn't generate additional interest * Very recent discussion on the future of the podling and it's dissolution As noted, JvZ indicated to the Incubator that the NMaven community wish to leave the ASF. = Olio = Olio has been incubating since September 2008. Olio is a web 2.0 toolkit to help developers evaluate the suitability, functionality and performance of various web technologies by implementing a reasonably complex application in several different technologies. All infrastructure has been created for the project. The olio web site has been set up via Confluence. Initial code drops for rails and php have been committed to the repository. = OpenWebBeans = Open Web Beans will be an ASL-licensed implementation of the Web Beans Specification which is defined as JSR-299. OpenWebBeans is entered incubator in October 26, 2008. Since then the following items has been done; * Matthias Wessendorf kindly accepts to be a new mentor of the project besides Kevan Miller. * The SVN, mailing lists and JIRA needs to be set up. Infra. group is informed about this. * The initial committers submitted their ICLA. * OpenWebBeans status page is generated, but it needs some more work. After the SVN is setup , we will be working for an import of a current codebase into the Apache repository. = PDFBox = Apache PDFBox is an open source Java library for working with PDF documents. PDFBox entered incubation on February 7th, 2008. The website has been set up. The license review is underway and has already progressed quite far. The export control notification has been set up. These tasks and most other tasks were all performed by PDFBox mentors (mostly by Jukka Zitting). Sadly, there has been almost no participation by the initial committers, yet, except for handling the license grants and CLAs. On the user side, some questions don't seem to get answered. Not many patches have reached us, either. Issues before graduation: * Increase community size and activity * Finish license review * First Apache release = PhotArk = Apache PhotArk will be a complete open source photo gallery application including a content repository for the images, a display piece, an access control layer, and upload capabilities. * PhotArk has been accepted for Incubation in August 19, 2008. * Issues before graduation : * Grow community * Releases * The community has not changed over the last month. * Our initial prototype is quickly approaching the point of initial release. We hope to have a .01 release by the end of the year. It is the hope of the current community that having a release will help attract other contributors. = 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 * Although we don't see a deluge of users yet, there are signs that people are starting to use Sling in their projects. * Sling has been presented at openexpo.ch and ApacheCon US. Software * Lots of bug fixes and enhancements since the first release in June. Therefore we are considering another full release soon. * Due to timing constraints work on enhancing the documentation on the site has not gone forward yet. Issues before graduation * Grow a more diverse community (so far commits mostly from Day employees). Licensing and other issues * none = Tashi = Tashi has been incubating since September 2008. The Tashi project aims to build a software infrastructure for cloud computing on massive internet-scale datasets (what we call Big Data). The idea is to build a cluster management system that enables the Big Data that are stored in a cluster/data center to be accessed, shared, manipulated, and computed on by remote users in a convenient, efficient, and safe manner. The initial committers' accounts are active. The initial code import has been completed. A project website and an incubation status page have been added. Items to be resolved before graduation: * Complete items listed on the project status page (relating to entering incubation) * Community diversity (currently Intel and CMU committers) * Demonstrate ability to create Apache releases = VCL = Status for November 2008 This is the first report to the board since being bootstrapped. Over the past month we have created our SVN tree and started some of the administrative actions. Community: User IDs were created for: * Aaron Peeler (NCSU) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Andy Kurth (NCSU) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Brian Bouterse (IBM) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * John Bass (NCSU) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Josh Thompson (NCSU) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Mark Gardner (VA Tech) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Mladen Vouk (NCSU) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Steve Thorpe (MCNC) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Don Sizemore (UNC-CH) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Ken Chestnutt (UNC-CH) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Paul Jones (UNC-CH) [MAILTO] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Next Steps The CCLA from NC State has been transmitted to Apache and we are looking for confirmation in officers/cclas.txt so we can begin introducing code. Our next steps are to complete IP clearance and get organized. = WSRP4J = The project did not report, but recent discussion with (http://markmail.org/message/txk5ay7raux6e6dc) indicates that the "fuzzy state of potential patent claims on WSRP 1.0" prevents the project from making releases at this time, which impacts community development. = XAP = XAP appears to have become essentially dead back in March or April. The Incubator PMC will investigate dormant status for it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
