Incubator Report May 2011
The Incubator continues to accept and graduate projects a pace. This month
we have two new projects, one retirement (with two more likely), and one
graduation.
Imperius has voted to retire. Others are likely to follow (see below).
LibCloud is proposed for graduation to TLP status, and presenting to the
Board as such.
OGNL, a Java development framework for Object-Graph Navigation Language, was
accepted for Incubation.
Airavata, a project that provides features to compose, manage, execute, and
monitor large scale applications and workflows on computational resources
ranging from local clusters to national grids and computing clouds, has been
accepted for Incubation.
Bluesky did not report, but did report last month and may not realize it is
still on a monthly reporting schedule. DeltaCloud did not report, and is
active so they should have reported. HISE and Stonehenge did not report,
and both look ripe for retirement. The latter community is actively
discussing that this month, but simply failed to report that discussion, and
the former appears mostly dead already.
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Incubator Project reports
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Amber
Amber has been incubating since July 2010. Amber is a project to develop a
Java library which provides an API specification for, and an unconditionally
compliant implementation of the OAuth v1.0, v1.0a and v2.0 specifications.
OAuth is a mechanism that allows users to authenticate and authorise access
by another party to resources they control while avoiding the need to share
their username and password credentials.
The most important issues that must be addressed before graduation are:
- Attract users and developers
- Generate a release
The Incubator PMC / ASF Board should be aware that:
- Community activity is relatively low
How has the community developed since the last report
- Some users have started asking for help or getting started guides on the
mailing list
How has the project developed since the last report
- Fixed some bugs
- Removed LGPL licensed files from website
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Bluesky
Did not report (currently on monthly schedule), but did report in April.
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Clerezza
(incubating since November 27th, 2009) is an OSGi-based modular application
and set of components (bundles) for building RESTFul Semantic Web
applications and services.
There are currently no issues requiring board attention.
Recent activity:
- Added WebId test suite
- Added Clerezza-UIMA CAS Consumer
- Released a new website version with much more documentation
Next steps:
- First release
- Improve documentation and tutorial to website
Top 2/3 Issues before graduation:
- Prepare some easy-to-run demos to get people interested in Clerezza
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Deltacloud
Did not report. Is active, and simply failed to report.
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Droids
Droids is an Incubator project arrived from Apache Labs. Droids entered
incubation on October, 2008.
It's an intelligent standalone robot framework that allows one to create and
extend existing web robots.
The last three months have been very productive for the project since
mailing and issue tracking activity have been very good. Our two new
committer have driven our first release which is planed for this month. More
people appeared on the mailing list and especially one dev is driving
constantly enhancement in our issue tracker.
Issues before graduation :
* IP clearance
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HCatalog
HCatalog is a table and storage management service for data created
using Apache Hadoop.
The most important issues in moving the project to graduation are
expanding the community of developers and producing a release of the
software.
Since the last report we have:
* got the initial code drop checked in
* got the build working for building, testing, and the documents
* branched in preparation for a 0.1 release
* started development on new features for 0.2
Currently there are 29 subscribers to the user list and 27 on the dev
list. There were 14 and 15 respectively last month.
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HISE
Did not report. Appears largely inactive, and perhaps should be retired.
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Jena
Jena was accepted into the Apache Incubator November 2010. It is an existing
project migrating to ASF. It has a large codebase that provides a semantic
web framework in Java that implements the key W3C recommendations for the
core semantic web technologies of
RDF and SPARQL.
Three most important issues to address for graduation:
* Create a code base in Apache with legal clearance.
* Establish the Apache-based community for developers, contributors and
users
* Create and communicate open project processes aligned to Apache
Issues for the Incubator PMC or ASF Board:
None.
Community development:
We have started to advertise the existence of Apache-hosted mailing lists.
Traffic on these lists continues to grow.
A new work area on enhancing the native storage system with transaction
support is being conducted in public on Apache cwiki and mailing lists.
Project development:
We have received the software grant from HP; HP has copyright on the
majority of the codebase. We can now migrate the code to Apache
infrastructure, and contact previous contributors for the remaining areas
(these are small in number and scope).
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Libcloud
Libcloud is a unified interface into various cloud service providers,
written in Python. Libcloud joined the Incubator on 3 November 2009.
During this month we have addressed all of the open graduation issues and
started a TLP voting thread on the incubator mailing list.
Community
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The Libcloud community continues to grow at a nice steady pace. In the past
few months we have received multiple community contributions, some of them
are listed bellow:
- compute driver for Gandi.net
- compute driver for Bluebox.net
- compute driver for the OpSource cloud
- compute driver for OpenStack (not merged yet, still working with the
original author on polishing it and resolving some open issues)
- libvirt proof-of-concept compute driver (not merged yet, still debating on
how we can fit it into our project)
During this month (May) we have also agreed upon a new chair (Tomaz Muraus).
To make our website more easy to update and more relevant to the users we
have ported it to the Apache CMS and added two new sections - "Community
resources" and "Contributing".
Some of the Libcloud developers have also been present at PyCon in Atlanta
in March where we have held a sprint.
As part of our ongoing effort to engage the community and inspire new
contributors, one of the committers will give a talk about Libcloud at
EuroPython 2011 in Italy where we will also held a sprint.
Releases
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The last stable release of Libcloud is 0.4.2 which was released on January
17th. We are currently working towards 0.5.0 which is considered as a big
milestone, because it will include many new features, fixes and
improvements:
- new Storage API
- new Load-balancer API
- new compute drivers
- fixes in the existing compute drivers
- increased test coverage
This version is planned to be released before the end of May.
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Lucene.NET
Lucene.Net was accepted into the Apache Incubator in February 2011.
Originally it was a sub project of the Lucene Project.
Lucene.Net is a port of the Lucene search engine library, written in C# and
targeted at .NET runtime users. Lucene.Net has three primary goals:
* Maintain the existing line-by-line port from Java to C#, fully automating
and commoditizing the process such that the project can easily synchronize
with the Java Lucene release schedule.
* High-performance C# search engine library.
* Maximize usability and power when used within the .NET runtime. To that
end, it will present a highly idiomatic, carefully tailored API that takes
advantage of many of the special features of the .NET runtime.
Recent Activity:
* Lucene.Net 2.9.4 is in the trunk and currently being tested
* Continuous Integration, Unit Testing, and Code Coverage has been fully
vetted
Current Activities:
* Release Lucene.Net 2.9.4
* Refactoring of project files for the main trunk, allowing us to fully
implement CI, Unit Testing, and Code Coverage
* Develop a process to automatically (as much as possible) convert the Java
Lucene code to C# (to maintain our line by line port)
Goals for graduation:
* Have a nearly fully automated process to convert Java Lucene to C#.
* Release Lucene.Net 3.0.3 (port of Java Lucene 3.0.3)
* Have a new .NET version of Lucene utilizing .NET constructs and idioms
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Mesos
Mesos is a cluster manager that provides resource sharing and isolation
across cluster applications.
Mesos entered incubation on December 23rd, 2010.
Community
* Mesos is actively being used at Twitter, Conviva, UCSF and UC Berkeley.
Project development
* We are still working on importing the source code to Apache, after having
merged in some major features this month (e.g. protocol buffers for
forward-compatible messaging, and improved fault recovery features).
Most important issues to address
* Import source code to Apache SVN
* Move discussion of new features and patches to JIRA
* Put together a first release
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MRUnit
MRUnit - a library to support unit testing of Hadoop MapReduce jobs.
MRUnit entered incubation on March 8th, 2011.
Community
* Eric Sammer has been leading discussions for a 0.5 release and a release
roadmap beyond that.
Issues before graduation
* Create the MRUnit web site
* Make an incubating release
* Grow the community size and diversity
Licensing and other issues
* none - MRUnit was originally a subproject of Hadoop
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NPanday
NPanday allows projects using the .NET framework to be built with Apache
Maven. NPanday allows .NET projects to be converted into Maven projects thus
allowing them to fully utilize the other technologies driven by Maven.
NPanday has been incubating since August 2010.
In our previous report (February 2011), we stated that we've staged the
NPanday-1.3-incubating release. However, there were a couple of issues that
we needed to address so we decided to not push through with it.
After addressing those issues, we've staged the NPanday-1.4.0-incubating
release for vote which includes the following issues:
* Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 Framework support
* Removal of UAC and PAB directories
* Updated groupIds of all NPanday components including plugins to
"org.apache.npanday"
This release is still waiting for other committers and mentors to test and
get the required binding votes.
Updated documentation was successfully deployed in
http://incubator.apache.org/npanday/docs/1.4.0-incubating/index.html
Code licenses and license headers have all been reviewed and pass RAT.
IP clearance was completed.
We have voted a new committer in the person of John Fallows and we also have
a new mentor, Matthias Wessendorf.
The top priorities towards graduation are:
* complete 1.4.0-incubating release
* guide regular patch contributors towards becoming committers
* improve engagement of existing committers
There are no issues for the Incubator PMC or board at this time.
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Nuvem
Apache Nuvem will define an open application programming interface for
common cloud application services, allowing applications to be easily ported
across the most popular cloud platforms.
Nuvem was accepted for Incubation on June, 2010.
* John Pradeep elected as Nuvem Committer
* Pasindu Madubashana starting to work on Data Services project as part of
GSoC 2011
* Community has started to be more active, with about 3 to 4 active
committers + the new GSoC student.
Top things to resolve prior to graduation:
* Increase the number of active committers.
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OGNL
Apache OGNL is a Java development framework for Object-Graph Navigation
Language, plus other extras such as list projection and selection and lambda
expressions.
The project just joined the Incubator on April 26, 2011.
What is needed to start, is resolving all the Issues enlisted on INFRA-3597,
resolution is in progress, actions have been completed are:
* PMC ML creation in discussion;
* Discussed position of PPMC after graduating into Commons;
* Created podling status page;
What is still in progress, instead:
* Grant Karma to SVN;
* Import codebase;
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OpenNLP
OpenNLP is a machine learning based toolkit for the processing of natural
language text. It supports the most common NLP tasks, such as tokenization,
sentence segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity extraction,
chunking, parsing, and coreference resolution. These tasks are usually
required to build more advanced text processing services.
OpenNLP entered incubation on 11/23 2010.
We just did our first Apache release on 2nd of May and are now planning
which features/work will go into the next release. For instance we started
to discuss/plan a big refactoring of our machine learning code, custom
feature generation for the name finder, dictionary support for the name
finder, etc.
There is still good traffic on both the user and dev mailing list. A couple
of users asked questions about how OpenNLP can be trained for new languages.
A list of the the most important issues to address in the move towards
graduation:
* Resolve potential IP issues around releasing training models
* Establish open regression tests for the parser and coreference component
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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 was accepted for Incubation on August 19, 2008.
* Subash Chaturanga elected as Photark committer
* Subash Chaturanga started working on "Face Recognition" project as part
of GSoC 2011
* Umashanthi Pavalanathan started working on making Photark more "Social"
based on Apache Shindig as part of GSoC 2011
* Issues before graduation :
* PhotArk started as a project with no initial code-base, and we have
grown the community to the minimal 3 independent committer size required for
graduation and have been seeing slow but continuous interest in the project.
The community started discussion graduation and based on mentors feedback we
are going to recruit couple committers before we start the graduation
process.
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Rave
Apache Rave is a new web and social mashup engine. It will provide an
out-of-the-box as well as an extendible lightweight Java platform to host,
serve and aggregate (Open)Social Gadgets and services through a highly
customizable and Web 2.0 friendly front-end.
Rave entered incubation on 2011-03-01.
All the three initial code donations have been provided and imported in SVN.
Current Status:
* The website has been published and continues to be updated regularly
* The community voted on and accepted a logo
* Issues have been added to JIRA and a release plan is beginning to form
* The community has begun working on implementation features and test
cases for the 0.1 incubator release within the project build structure.
* Community members have submitted proposals for ApacheCon to discuss the
Rave project
* Mailing list activity remains high
Next steps:
* Continue to build up awareness of Rave and grow the community
* Complete a sufficient number of features for a 0.1 incubator release
Issues before graduation:
* Complete 1.0 release
* Expand the community/user base
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SIS
Apache SIS is a toolkit that spatial information system builders or users
can use to build applications containing location context. This project will
look to store reference implementations of spatial algorithms, utilities,
services, etc. as well as serve as a sandbox to explore new ideas. Further,
the goal is to have Apache SIS grow into a thriving Apache top-level
community, where a host of SIS/GIS related software (OGC datastores,
REST-ful interfaces, data standards, etc.) can grow from and thrive under
the Apache umbrella.
* Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
Not at this time
* Community progress since the last report
Since SIS released its first release 0.1-incubating in November 2010,
development has slowed down. This is a small core set of committers and
community though. We haven't had a lot of user mailing list activity.
We should try and target a 0.2-incubating release with a layer service and
some basic integration with Apache Tika (a GDAL parser is being worked on in
that community with an eye towards integration into SIS). Also we are
looking at Apache OODT as a mechanism for geospatial storage and
persistence.
There has been renewed interest from ESRI and we are pursuing this as well.
* Project progress since last report
SIS was voted into the Incubator by the IPMC on February 21, 2010.
Development progress since the 0.1-incubating release has been modest,
focusing primarily on the community development mentioned above. There has
been some internal effort at JPL to integrate SIS into ongoing projects such
as the CO2 Portal, the CMDS project and others. We hope to begin the push
towards 0.2-incubating as specified above.
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Stanbol
Stanbol is a modular software stack and reusable set of components for
semantic content management.
Entered incubation on 2010-11-15.
Community development:
- some new users started playing with Stanbol and asking for guidance on
the mailing lists
Project activities:
- lots of package/module refactoring
- added a benchmark tool for Enhancer
- KReS module build and tests fixed
- setup continuous integration with Jenkins
- added JCR module of CMS Adapter
Next steps:
- Make a first release, possibly omitting modules with ASF-incompatible
dependencies
- Grow the community
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Stonehenge
Did not report. The community is currently discussing retirement of the
project.
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VCL
VCL has been incubating since December 2008. VCL is a cloud computing
platform for the management of physical and virtual
machines.https://cwiki.apache.org/VCL/
Community Involvement:
* As stated in the previous report, the Apache VCL community continues to
grow. We're seeing more people start to contribute to our online
documentation and file JIRA issues. We're also starting to see more patches
attached to JIRA issues.
* We continue to see growing interest in the VCL project from a variety of
locations.
Releases:
* We cut a new release that was primarily for bugfixes. Apache VCL 2.2.1 was
released on April 8th, 2011. In our last report, we stated that we had hoped
to get it out by the end of February. Other duties of the developers caused
some of the delay. Additional delay was due to a bug found after the release
voting took place, requiring a new round of voting.
Top Issues Before Graduation:
* Continue to increase contributors to establish a more diverse development
community
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Whirr
Whirr is a library for running services in the cloud.
Whirr was accepted into the incubator on 11 May 2010. Status information is
available at http://incubator.apache.org/projects/whirr.html.
Progress since the last report (February 2011): We have made the fourth
incubator release (0.4.0-incubating). We continue to get contributions from
outside the initial committer base, and development has been steady over the
period. Whirr continues to be covered at community events, including an
upcoming presentation at OSCON.
Plans for the next period:
* Encourage community growth.
* Do a fifth release.
* Strengthen the core API to make adding new services easier.
Top three items to resolve before graduation:
* Increase community involvement in the project
* Make several incubating releases (Done)
* Support at least three services on Whirr (Done, there are now six)
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Wink
Apache Wink is a project that enables development and consumption of REST
style web services. The core server runtime is based on the JAX-RS (JSR 311)
standard. The project also introduces a client runtime which can leverage
certain components of the server-side runtime. Apache Wink will deliver
component technology that can be easily integrated into a variety of
environments.
Apache Wink has been incubating since 2009-05-27.
Notable Activity:
* Luciano Resende and Raymond Feng elected as Wink committers
* Luciano Resende elected as PMC member
* Released Apache Wink 1.1.3.
* The wink community has added a couple new binary Providers and bug
fixes.
Planned Activity:
* JAX-RS 2.0 is starting up in the JCP. May attempt to prototype/develop
against the next specification to provide an eventual JAX-RS 2.0 compliant
runtime.
* Work towards graduation.
Top issues before graduation:
*
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Wookie
Wookie is a Java server application that allows you to upload and deploy
widgets for your applications. Wookie is based on the W3C Widgets
specification, but widgets can also be included that use extended APIs such
as Google Wave Gadgets and OpenSocial.
Wookie has been incubating since 17th July 2009
Since February 2011:
* Release Candidate 0.9 put out for testing and feedback from
wookie-dev members
* Feedback and issues for Release Candidate 0.9 posted to JIRA
** Almost all issues closed, new RC build imminent
* Planned event for March took place
** Demonstrated how to make widgets for wookie, use of the APIs
** Promoted how to get more involved with Wookie, rather than
simply using it
** New participants at event posted issues/patches to JIRA for
first time
* Various bug fixes and updates to main code branch
* Community members working with Apache Rave (incubating) to explore
collaboration options
* Community members exploring Apache Amber (incubating) for oAuth
support within wookie
Next steps:
* Complete 0.9 build
* Continue to work and liase with Apache Rave project
* Continue exploration of using Apache Amber for oAuth support within
wookie
Issues before graduation:
* complete first release
* build community/expand user base
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Zeta Components
Apache Zeta Components are a high quality, general purpose library of loosly
coupled components for development of applications based on PHP.
What has been done:
- All INFRA tasks have been implemented
- Integrated two new committers
- Fixed bugs
What is still in progress
- Implementation of a build system in order to replace the current one
- Discussion about a roadmap for a release
- Discussing about how to do "marketing" and make the project more visible
What needs to be done:
- Fix more bugs
- Get a release
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