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From: "Noel J. Bergman" <noel@devtech.com>
To: <board@apache.org>
Cc: <general@incubator.apache.org>
Subject: January 2007 Incubator Report (Revised)
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:27:18 -0500
Message-ID: <NBBBJGEAGJAKLIDBKJOPGEPMMHAC.noel@devtech.com>
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More and more ASF Members continue to join the Incubator PMC to help
shephard projects through the process.  ActiveMQ is the latest of a recent
string of ASF Projects asking to go TLP.  Solr requested graduation to the
Lucene project.  Synapse graduated to the WS project.

Agila has been placed into a dormancy status, with only the retirement of
the mailing lists outstanding
(http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-1056).  AltRMI is also being
placed in a dormant status.  Others are likely to follow.  We may suggest
that other TLPs that have dormant codebases move them to a "dormant/" (or
some such) area of the Incubator, so that people can see the existance of
the code, and it can be revived in-place if a community forms around it.

===============================================

Incubator monthly reports for January 2007

The following projects failed to report on time:
 * Ivy
 * JuiCE
 * Qpid
 * Roller

----

=== Agila ===

Agila was retired this quarter with only the retirement of the mailing lists
outstanding (http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-1056).

----

=== CXF ===
Project name - CXF

Description - SOA enabling framework, web services toolkit

Date of entry - August, 2006

Top three items to resolve -
 1. Diversity - Active commiters are 90% IONA people
 2. Growth of community - related to diversity, we have not yet had the
opportunity to add additional commiters.   The traffic on the dev list is
"steady."   With milestone 1 out, we are beginning to attract users.
Traffic on the user list is now growing.
 3. Not enough documentation or work occuring on the wiki.


Community aspects:
  * Lots of discussions about various topics (Reliable Messaging, tooling,
etc...) occuring on the dev list.
  * Released milestone 1 in December.   A bit late, but more feature were
added and stability and number of bugs have been good.
  * Working with the Yoko folks about transitioning to CXF (from ObjectWeb
Celtix)
  * Started working with the Geronimo folks to integrate with them.
  * Created a eclipse plugin/bundle of our code for the Eclipse STP project
for them to integrate our code.

Code aspects:
  * Milestone 1 released, working on setting features for the next RC.
(hopefully around March)
  * Started discussing some architectural changes, especially in regard to
the tooling.


----

=== Felix ===

Felix is an implementation of the OSGi R4 service platform.

Community
 * The community is working toward incubator gradution.
 * Continued organization of the wiki (and generated web site), creating the
subproject documentation section with new documentation on for various
subprojects, including a placeholder for the Felix Commons initiative.
 * Voted Karl Pauls as Release Manager.
 * Community voted on and released Felix 0.8.0-incubator.
 * A Felix-related talk was given at ApacheCon 2006 in Austin, Texas.
 * We have seen an apparent influx of new community members based on some
new faces being active on the mailing list and even a new contributor (Chris
Custine).
 * Emil Ivov announced the 1.0-alpha1 release of SIP Communicator, a
Felix-based multi-protocol instant messenger and SIP software phone.

Software
 * Felix 0.8.0-incubator approved by the Incubator PMC and is available for
download.
 * Felix Commons initiative started in earnest with the goal of creating
bundles out of popular open source libraries, headed by Enrique Rodriguez.
John Conlon submitted several POM files for various libraries and Felix
Meschberger and Tim Moloney have also expressed interest in doing so.
 * Several patches from Felix Meschberger improving the framework's ability
to be used in embedded use cases, particularly issues surrounding framework
shutdown and clean up.
 * Created a new Maven 2 plugin for creating OSGi bundles, which uses the
BND tool from Peter Kriens. This plugin is quite a bit different than the
existing plugin, but the goal is to try to merge the two if possible.
 * Major patch to iPOJO by Clement Escoffier.
 * Initial prototyping of "require bundle" functionality complete in Richard
Hall's sandbox, work has begun to transition to trunk.
 * Patch submitted by Chris Custine to implement bundle manifest header
localization.
 * Patch submitted by Kamen Petroff to allow additional imports to be
specified for the old Maven plugin.
 * Rick Litton worked with the Eclipse community to get their extension
point mechanism working on Felix, this effort will continue as bundle
localization and require-bundle capabilities are added to Felix.

Licensing and other isses
 * Committed latest OSGi Alliance source code, which is the official release
licensed under the Apache license.
 * Committed OSGi Alliance Foundation source code (licensed under the Apache
license), which provides stubs for javax.microedition.io, so that we can
compile everything again.
 * A patch from Felix Meschberger for the URL Handlers service was put on
hold since it was not clear if their were any licensing implications as a
result of its inspiration from Equinox code. The patch/functionality is
targeted to be resolved for the 1.0.0 release.

----

=== FtpServer ===

FtpServer is an implementation of RFC959 and related protocols.

Community
 * Voted to add new commiter, Dave Roberts. Actually CLA registration and
account setup still in progress
 * The mail traffic on the dev list has increase the last couple of months,
probably due to more active development again
 * But, we still don't have a large community backing FtpServer. More active
communication about the project might be needed.

Code and documentation
 * Migration to Maven 2 complete
 * Integration with MINA almost complete. When done, MINA will be the
default choice for socket handling. Our old code will remain to support FTP
and FTPS on Java 1.4 platforms
 * We are getting close to a sufficiently complete code for doing a first
milestone release soon.
 * Documentation has been migrated to the Confluence wiki. We expect this
will make our documentation easier to maintain and up-to-date.

----

=== Graffito ===

Graffito is a framework for content-based applications, especially in
portlet environments. Graffito entered incubation on September 20, 2004.

Top three items to resolve before graduation:

   1. Build a self-sustaining community
   2. Create an incubating Graffito release
   3. Move the JCR mapping component to the Jackrabbit project

There hasn't been much activity in the Graffito project since the last
report. A discussion on what to do with the project that still hasn't
reached "critical mass" after over two years of incubation is currently
taking place. The perceived complexity of the project is seen by many as a
barrier to start using or contributing to Graffito. Splitting the project
into more manageable component projects was raised as one potential approach
to reviving the codebase and project community.

----

=== Heraldry ===

Heraldry is a project to implement the OpenID digital identity
specification.

Despite a single large block checkin recently, there is almost no activity
on the heraldry-dev list.   Also files previously checked in retain LGPL
license headers.  This has not been corrected despite requests from the
mentors.

----

=== Lucene.Net ===

Lucene.Net is a port of the Java Lucene to C#.  The API, algorithm and index
are cross compatible.

Incubation

* Lucene.Net has been under incubation since April 2006

Community

* An active, but a small community exists.  The challenge has been to bring
in folks who are willing to contribute to the code beside myself.

Code and documentation

* The code base continues to develop and new releases are being made.
Recently Lucene.Net 2.0 "final" was release as well as Highlighter.Net 2.0
and Snowball.Net 2.0.  In addition, for each of those components, there
corresponding MSDN style documentation is also release.

----

=== 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

This is the second monthly report for this podling.

Dan Fabulich (listed on original proposal) had his account created and was
added to the committer list.

Healthy discussion taking part about design on the dev@ list.

No new committers to date.

----

=== UIMA ===

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

UIMA was accepted for incubation on October 10, 2006

Top 3 things to resolve before graduation:

  1. Complete code transition to Apache, do a release with all IP issues
cleared
  1. Attract diverse, active committers
  1. Do a migration tool to enable migration to the Apache version
UIMA's incubation status file is here:
http://incubator.apache.org/projects/uima.html

Some recent activity:

  * The UIMA Sandbox has been populated with some example annotators
  * A person new to the project, Jorn Kottmann, has written an Eclipse
plugin he wants to contribute - we're going through the steps to bring this
into the UIMA Sandbox. He has submitted a software grant, and we're awaiting
it's acknowledgement (as of Wednesday, Jan 10)
  * We expect to do a release next month, and have been working to get all
the little details needed for this completed.

We expect that we will need some assistance in doing our first release, to
verify we're following the rules properly. We will start by using our
mentors, and then ask the incubator PMC to review the proposed release.

----


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