The last three months have seen the first migrations from CVS to SVN in the Jakarta project with the ORO and Velocity projects moving over. More projects are expected to move over in the next quarter, with ECS and Commons being the first two targetted.

The board suggested that the previous report needed more sub-project news, and so for this reoprt any sub-project that has a release, or a change in status, needs to supply a short piece of text on the current situation for that part of Jakarta. The community has responded very well and the chair has not had to write any of the subproject section this time around.

Being able to use LGPL has been brought up a few times in the last quarter. It has come up with a desire to use Hibernate in various codebases and Dumbster for unit tests in Commons-Email. Dumbster relicenced under ASL 2.0 wihle Hibernate use is still unsolved. Linked to this was a similar issue with JGraph, which dual-licenced with MPL in order to allow us to use it, though the move for this did not come from within the Jakarta community afaik. I'll be aiming to report back to the community on the status of this issue in the week after the next board meeting.

On the licence side, a Commons component (VFS) wishes to have a component which depends on a Novell licence. We're currently treating this as similar to Sun's licensing for JavaMail. Imports allowed, but no jars in CVS or iBiblio.

Additionally, we have a Clover license for use by Jakarta (and the rest of the ASF). This should make it easier for us to show the high level of our unit tests.

In terms of releases, the major points of this quarter's releases are a set of 1.0's from the Commons sub-project (Math, Configuration, Jelly-RC1, Chain) which shows that the Commons community continues to grow, and the stable Tomcat 5.5 release, our most popular product.

• Lucene and Slide both considering TLP.
• Commons HttpClient to Jakarta sub-project.
• Turbine JCS to Jakarta sub-project.
• More Subversion migrations - ECS and Commons in the planning.
• Turbine migration to SVN under consideration -- desire JCS resolution.
• Improvement of the download page.
• Automate creation of Maven bundles and automate bundle uploading to Maven repository, even for projects which use Ant (not Maven) for building.

December

• 9 December 2004 - Commons Chain 1.0
• 9 December 2004 - Commons Math 1.0
• 7 December 2004 - Lucene 1.4.3
• 3 December 2004 - Commons Validator 1.1.4
• 2 December 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.5-beta

November

• 25 November 2004 - Tomcat 5.0.30-beta
• 23 November 2004 - Commons Jelly 1.0-RC1
• 21 November 2004 - Commons HttpClient 3.0 beta1
• 19 November 2004 - JMeter 2.0.2
• 10 November 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.4 (first stable release of Tomcat 5.5)

October

• 30 October 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.4-alpha
• 28 October 2004 - Turbine 2.3.1
• 17 October 2004 - Tapestry 3.0.1
• 11 October 2004 - Tomcat 4.1.31-stable
• 11 October 2004 - Commons HttpClient 2.0.2
• 11 October 2004 - Commons Configuration 1.0
• 06 October 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.3-alpha
• 06 October 2004 - Tomcat 5.0.29-beta
• 04 October 2004 - Commons Betwixt 0.6

New ASF members

• 19 November 2004 - Yoav Shapira (yoavs) - Tomcat, Commons

New PMC members

• 11 October 2004 - James Mason (masonjm) - Slide
• 19 October 2004 - Robert Burell Donkin (rdonkin) - Commons

New Committers

• 4 December 2004 - Warwick Burrows (wburrows) - Slide
• 12 November 2004 - Oliver Heger (oheger) - Commons
• 7 November 2004 - Hans Gilde (hgilde) - Commons
• 6 November 2004 - Bernhard Messer (bmesser) - Lucene
• 25 September 2004 - David Spencer (dspencer) - Lucene

(based on projects that have had a notable event, ie) release, change of location within Jakarta)

Commons Betwixt

Betwixt is a bean <-> xml binder. Jakarta Commons Betwixt 0.6 featured a refactored codebase including rewriting bean reading code but preserved backwards compatibility with the earlier releases. A 0.6.1 release (with more functionality and some bug fixes) is expected soon.

Betwixt is small component closely related to several other commons components. The Betwixt community is very happy in the commons.

Chain

Commons Chain 1.0 was finally released, the component having been promoted from the sandbox to Commons Proper in July. We expect to see Chain put into use almost immediately by projects such as Apache Struts.

Configuration

Commons Configuration is an API to deal easily with various configuration formats (properties files, xml files, JNDI...) We have finally stabilized and released the first official release after a slow maturation of 3 years across various Jakarta projects. Many new ideas are floating around and a new release (1.1) is expected in late December or early January.

Daemon

Commons Daemon, although quiet on the mailing list and in Bugzilla, has seen a few bug fixes and improvements. Efforts have been made to improve stability on various operating systems. A Commons-Daemon 1.1 release is forthcoming, most likely in early 2005.

Email

A few very enthusiastic volunteers have helped re-energize Commons Email. Extensive unit tests were submitted via Bugzilla, a few lingering bugs were cleared up and documentation was extended. This activity led to a successful vote for promotion from the Sandbox.

In preparation for the promotion, it was realized that there was an issue with the [http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/ Dumbster] library, which is used for unit tests and which was only available under the LGPL license. When this was brought up with the developer of Dumbster, he agreed to change his license to ASF 2.0.

A vote on a 1.0 release is likely to be called soon after the promotion is completed.

Commons Email and Commons Chain have recently run into issues using Maven as a build tool with their dependencies on libraries which are only distributed under the Sun Binary Code License. One of Maven's strengths is the automatic retrieval of dependencies, but the SBCL prevents hosting of these libraries on a public Maven repository. Individual developers must retrieve these libraries independently. This issue also is also complicating automated build processes. An enhancement request has been filed for the Maven Ant plugin which may help some, but our understanding is that the terms of this license will continue to require more manual intervention for these projects than for other Commons projects.

HttpClient

HttpClient has entered the 3.0 beta stage. The API is now frozen unless major problems are discovered. We hope to have a final 3.0 release by the end of 2004 or early 2005.

Now that 3.0 is nearing completion we anticipate beginning HttpClient 4.0 soon. This release will feature a number of major changes with the main focus on making HttpClient more compact and reusable. The core HTTP library will be refactored into into smaller separable pieces with the HTTP methods separated into request/response pairs. We also plan to start working on a number of application level components such as a simple HTTP proxy, web crawler, etc. that build upon HttpClient. The core library and components will be released at the Jakarta level.

Jelly

We are finally nearing a 1.0 release. We've put out a release candidate, have some minor bugs to address and are looking to

better our documentation of Jelly's taglibs.

Math

We have finally released 1.0 after a laborious 18 months of steady commitment by the whole team.

Resources

Resources has been promoted out of the Sandbox and into Commons Proper. This component has been around, and has been stable, for some time now. A 1.0 release is anticipated in the near future.

Transaction

Transaction has been promoted out of the Sandbox and into Commons Proper and a 1.0 release candidate has been released. Transaction provides utility classes commonly used in transactional Java programming.

Validator

Validator 1.1.4 has been released. This is a minor maintenance release to the 1.1.x branch adding a couple of missing properties to the API.

Slide

The Slide community is working towards the 2.1 release. It introduces lots of new features and fixes most important bugs of Slide 2.0. As Slide has become huge with lots of different components grouped around WebDAV releasing single components all by themselves now is an option.

Tapestry

The current stable release is 3.0.1. Work is well under way by Howard Lewis Ship and others for 3.1, which will have major changes, including friendly URLs, HiveMind for services, simplified component parameters, and simplified page parameters. The community of users has been growing rapidly.

Tomcat

Tomcat reached a significant milestone with the first stable release of the 5.5 branch, v5.5.4. The release has been well-received, with only a small number of bug reports, especially given the magnitude of the changes from Tomcat 5.0.x.

Work continues on the 5.0.x branch in maintenance mode, fixing significant bugs as well as any security, Spec-compliance, and showstopper issues as always. The 5.0.30 release was cut near the end of November, addressing the vast majority of open 5.0.x issues.

Older branches of Tomcat (3.x, 4.x), are practically at end-of-life support. There are no planned releases for them at this time, although individual Tomcat committers may continue working on the code base.

The Tomcat connectors have also been active, led by Mladen Turk's efforts. Mod_jk2 is officially at end-of-life as well: while a worthy experiment, its design proved too fragile, resulting in numerous significant bugs. Maintenance and improvements continue on the original mod_jk, as well as joint work with httpd developers on a new mod_proxy extension slated for inclusion in the 2.1 versions of Apache httpd.

There has been significant effort by the Tomcat developers and members of the community to shore up documentation, both in the Tomcat-proper (i.e. part of our CVS), and in our FAQ, Wiki, and external resources. We've seen a demonstrated reduction in the documentation-related complaints and questions over the past couple of months, and intend to continue working in this area.

Turbine

Turbine is working towards a new major release, 2.4 which will be based on a componentized architecture. A second milestone is expected in December. The first components from the Fulcrum repostitory have been voted and released.