The last quarter is most notable for the Lucene promotion to TLP and the promotion of JCS from within the Turbine subproject to its own subproject status. Lucene is cleanly separated now while the only infrastructure tie left between Turbine and JCS will be handled when JCS migrates to Subversion.

On the promotion subject, HttpClient is still pending promotion to subproject status and Slide is still planning on applying to be a TLP.

The Jakarta site saw a lot of cleaning and revamping. It now mimics the www.apache.org 3 column style and has had much in the way of superfluous content removed. The download/mirror pages have been redesigned to increase usability for both subprojects and users. This includes these board reports being available online at http://jakarta.apache.org/site/pmc/board-reports.html.

Release-wise, continued Tomcat and Commons releases were joined by new alpha releases from the Tapestry and Hivemind communities.

Various legal-discussions have been spawned by Jakarta this quarter. Apache's lack of oversight over unofficial translation sites, questions over how to handle the ASF licence with javadoc pages and usage of government public domain software. All are still not fully resolved at this stage. Very recently there have been more branding issues with JBoss and Tomcat due to an SD Magazine press release.

Lastly, JetBrains have agreed to provide licences to their IDE, "Intellij IDEA", on an Apache-wide committer basis and not per subproject/codebase.

• HttpClient to subproject level.
• Taglibs, ECS, BSF, JCS, Cactus SVN migrations.
• Improved Jakarta level javadoc indexing.

• 9 March 2005 - JCS moves to Jakarta Subproject
• 6 March 2005 - Commons Logging 1.0.5 Alpha1 Released

• 24 February 2005 - HiveMind 1.1-alpha-2 Released
• 22 February 2005 - Tapestry 3.1-alpha-1 Released
• 20 February 2005 - Tomcat 5.5.8-alpha Released
• 15 February 2005 - Tapestry 3.0.2 Released
• 14 February 2005 - Lucene moves to TLP
• 06 February 2005 - Commons HttpClient 3.0 RC1 Released

• 30 January 2005 - Tomcat 5.5.7 Voted Stable
• 28 January 2005 - Cactus 1.7 Released
• 20 January 2005 - Tomcat 5.5.7-alpha Released
• 19 January 2005 - HiveMind 1.1-alpha-1 Released

• 15 December 2004 - Commons Transaction 1.0 Released
• 15 December 2004 - Commons-Net 1.3.0 Released
• 12 December 2004 - Tomcat 5.5.6-alpha Released

New Committers

• 3 December 2004 - Warwick Burrows (wburrows) - Slide
• 5 December 2004 - Siegfried Goeschl (sgoeschl) - Turbine
• 18 December 2004 - Thomas Draier (draier) - Slide
• 3 January 2005 - William Glass-Husain (wglass) - Velocity
• 3 January 2005 - Kazuhito Suguri (suguri) - Cactus
• 20 January 2005 - Carlos Villegas (cvillegas) - Slide
• 9 February 2005 - David Brosius (dbrosius) - BCEL
• 10 March 2005 - Dhiru Pandey (dhirup) - Taglibs
• 10 March 2005 - Martijn Blankestijn (mblankestijn) - JMeter
• 14 March 2005 - Jim Jagielski and William Rowe Jr both joining Tomcat/mod_jk.
• 15 March 2005 - Magnus Grimsell has been voted in and is currently submitting his CLA - Cactus

Jakarta has replaced most of the nagoya references. While there are still a few (250 to 300) it's a good improvement on the 1300 or so there were at first and many of the references remaining are in the less active areas (both committer and user).

BCEL, Commons, Regexp and the Jakarta website have all migrated from CVS to SVN, joining ORO and Velocity. This represents about a third of Jakarta. Another third are slowly on their way, while the last third would rather stay with CVS such a time as announcements are made to curtail CVS usage.

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

Commons HttpClient

Commons HttpClient has had its first 3.0 release candidate and a final release should happen shortly.

Much work has also been put into planning for Jakarta HttpClient (HttpClient 4.0), and initial development has begun. The focus of Jakarta HttpClient will be on making HttpClient more compact, modular, and reusable. We are currently putting together use cases to help guide the 4.0 development.

Commons Logging

Alpha release containing improved memory recycling during hot deployment in containers without explicit support for JCL. Pushing towards a full 1.0.5 release.

Commons Net

Commons Net 1.3.0 was released in late December. This release contained a large number of enhancements and bug fixes, but the most important change was the addition of NTP/SNTP support. Since 1.3.0, there have been more enhancements to the FTP parser (currently in CVS), with the ultimate aim of making the FTP client configuration much more flexible and consequently being able to support different locales seamlessly. This, plus other bug fixes currently in the works, will form the basis of the 1.4 release.

Commons Transaction

1.0 final has been released in December. 1.1 already is feature complete and in beta status. It mainly adds deadlock detection and a partially revised interface layout. Slide 2.2 and OJB 1.1 are likely to use it.

Cactus

Cactus 1.7 has been released preparing the way for a big refactoring. We are indeed going to refactor Cactus to leverage Cargo (http://cargo.codehaus.org). Nicolas Chalumeau (contributor) and Vincent Massol have been working on this. That should lighten Cactus and allow supporting many more containers and features (like hot deploy, etc) which our users have been asking for a while. Two new committers have been voted in recently (Kazuhito and Magnus). EJB Cactification has been added recently by Magnus and he's busy adding new improvements to it. Felipe is continuing with improvements to the Maven plugin for Cactus.

JCS

JCS has been adjusting to to its recent move to a site level project and is working on its first formal release. There are no known open issues.

HiveMind

Many new features have been recently added to HiveMind, driven by the needs of Tapestry primarily; this includes the ability to switch the locale on the fly (on a per-thread basis). This is used when accessing per-module message catalogs. In addition, HiveMind may now make ordinary POJOs into services (without a specific interface). The XML descriptors have been simplified, as a package for the module may now be specified, allowing the many class names in a descriptor to be abbreviated.

Discussions are in place now about limiting the scope of 1.1 so that we can progress to a beta and final release.

Tapestry

An early alpha release of Tapestry 3.1 has been released. Tapestry 3.0.2 may not be the final bug fix release for 3.0; there are discussions about fixing a few more bugs and integrating Paul Ferraro's "friendly URLs" patch into the code base for 3.0.3.

Refactorings continue in the 3.1 code base, in pursuit of JSR-168 Portlet support.

Tomcat

This has been a quiet period for Tomcat, partially because I've been extremely busy at school ;) We released versions 5.5.7 (stable) and 5.5.8 (alpha for now), each of which was a maintenance release addressing a good number of bugs and user requests. Version 5.5.9 should be out within the next couple of weeks, also addressing a number of recently reported issued (none serious).

Two noteworthy items: first, adoption of Tomcat 5.5 has really accelerated following the first couple of stable releases. Many users are reporting satisfaction with the increased performance and stability. And second, we have kept in touch with the Geronimo project, especially with Jacek Laskowski (sp probably), working towards seamless Geronimo/Tomcat integration.