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From: "Noel J. Bergman" <noel@devtech.com>
To: <board@apache.org>
Cc: <general@incubator.apache.org>
Subject: January 2008 Incubator Board Report
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:37:56 -0500
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Yoko (CORBA implementation) has been dissolved, with parts going Geronimo
and CXF.  The FtpServer project has been graduated as a sub-project of MINA,
where there is a community interested in maintaining that code base as a
MINA implementation of the FTP protocol.

There has been discussion of various processes, with Robert Burrell Donkin
continuing his on-going efforts to provide improved Incubator documentation.

Bill Stoddard has taken a lead role in helping to bring the BlueSky project
from China into the Incubator.  The acceptance vote into the Incubator has
just passed.  It will be very interesting to see the social evolution of the
community, in terms of open source culture and language.  I sensed some
trust issues during the discussions, and earnest forthrightness on the part
of those proposing the project.

We have several pending proposals, including BENNU, which would be a
successor to the m0n0wall project.  Those in the "oh, not another Java
project" camp might want to come over and participate.  :-)

  ref: http://people.apache.org/~dsh/bennu/BENNU_PROPOSAL.txt


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Buildr
Description - Buildr is a build system for Java applications written in
Ruby.

Date of Entry - Nov. 2007

* Development

We're working toward Buildr 1.3 which will hopefully become our first Apache
release. The main focus of this release is multi-language support with the
big addition of Scala. It also opens the door for other languages. The work
done around JRuby is also coming to fruition with, for example, the
possibility of writing tests with RSpec to run against your Java classes.

* Community

A very steady stream of patches is coming from a steadily increasing
community of users. We've had contributions for EAR support, JRuby, fixes
around IDE tasks, ... We're monitoring closely the advanced users that
submit patches consistently, to see if we can attract a few of them to
become committers.

* Issues before graduation

When 1.3 is ready, we'll have to face all the issues surrounding the release
of Ruby code. Hopefully, when all these issues have been ironed out, our
main problems will be solved. From then it's business as usual: continuing
to build a healthy community around Buildr.


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CXF
Project Name - Apache CXF

Description - SOA enabling framework, web services toolkit

Date of Entry - August 2006

Items to resolve before graduation:

Finalize/cleanup the PPMC and committer list to reflect actual
participation. We'll be starting those discussions and stuff shortly with
hopes to start graduation discussions shortly there after. Dan Kulp had a
"face to face" chat with Jim Jagielski at ApacheCon about how to proceed
with this.

Community aspects:

Worked with Geronimo and Yoko projects to break Yoko into parts bringing the
webservices stuff into CXF. Initial bits of code have been "svn cp" into
CXF.

Started discussions with Dain (and OpenEJB) about adding soap encoding and
JAX-RPC support into CXF. Work on that has started with contributions from
Dain.

Lots of traffic on the cxf-user list. That's a good thing. Some of them are
digging into CXF code and submitting patches and suggestions. That's an even
better thing. We need to find ways to get more of that.

Code aspects:

Released 2.0.3-incubator fixing over 70 issues found by users.

Preparing 2.0.4-incubator to be released soon fixing another 50+ issues.

2.1 work is progressing well.


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Imperius

Imperius has been incubating since November 2007.

Imperius is a rule-based infrastructure management tool

Infrastructure has been set up. Mailing lists are operational.

The repository has been set up, and the first code drop has arrived.  Work
is underway to organize the repository into a maven-friendly structure.  The
website is operational.

Community

Two of the original committers have had accounts created. We are still
waiting
for the arrival of ICLAs for the others before creating accounts for them.

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JSPWiki

JSPWiki has been incubating since September 2007.

JSPWiki is a JSP-based wiki program.

JSPWiki 2.6 LGPL was finally released just before Christmas, so the
development
could finally be moved to the Apache Incubation SVN. The code is
expected
to be transferred to the Apache repository within the next few weeks.

The incubator web site was also created.

Community

The developer and user mailing lists continue to have strong activity,
with a few dozen active participants and over a hundred monitoring
the lists.

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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 is still small, with a few more members now compared to the
beginning.

The code base has been imported and the package names have been changed to
org.apache.sanselan. Work continues on scrubbing the code and organizing it
into maven.

A release is being prepared.

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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:

Version 2.2.1 was released 12/2008, our third incubator release. We were the
first ones to follow the new incubator guidelines for distributing from
w.a.o/dist/incubator/{podling}. As part of this release, we also changed our
download pages to use the Apache mirroring mechanisms. Robert Burrell Donkin
was extremely helpful to us in this process, joining our dev mailing list
and being very responsive - Thanks Robert!.

A member of the team attended ApacheCon 2007 US and presented UIMA in the
"fast track" incubator presentations. Included in that presentation, which
is available on this wiki, are slides describing UIMA use in several
projects, and its adoption by several commercial companies.

A software grant for UIMA-EE, an extension to UIMA that uses JMS and Apache
ActiveMQ to enable additional, more flexible scaleout capabilities, was
submitted to the ASF, and has recently been received. Temis, a commercial
company using UIMA, has expressed interest in joining the development work
around this new capability, and we welcome their participation.

The Cas Editor is now ready for its first release inside the UIMA project,
some short test which roughly followed the test plan were successful. The
release should be out this month.

Items to complete before graduation:

We still need to attract more new committers. We're trying to spark even
more activity in the sandbox to get people to contribute.

Community:

We continue to do outreach to attract new contributors, which may become
committers. The donation of UIMA-EE is facilitating this.

There's a good amount of traffic on both the dev and user list.


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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.


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Tika
Tika ( http://incubator.apache.org/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. The
previous report to the board can be found at
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/October2007.

Community:

No new committers since the last report, activity has been moderate but
steady, leading to the 0.1 release.

Development:

Tika 0.1 (incubating) has just been released.

Chris Mattmann intends to use that release in Nutch, That's good progress
towards Tika's goal of providing data extraction functionality to other
projects.

A new Tika logo was created by Google Highly Open Participation student,
hasn't been integrated yet.

Issues before graduation:

Now that the first release is out, we need to work on growing the community
and figuring out how to best interact with external parser projects.


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