This was extracted (@ 2024-07-17 21:10) from a list of minutes
which have been approved by the Board.
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WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it no longer in the best interest of the Foundation to continue the Apache XML project due to inactivity NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the Apache XML project is hereby terminated; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Attic PMC be and hereby is tasked with oversight over the software currently maintained by the Apache XML Project; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache XML" is hereby terminated; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Apache XML PMC is hereby terminated. Special Order 7E, Terminate the XML Project, was approved by Unanimous Vote of the directors present.
No report was submitted.
A resolution to move XML to the Attic will be voted this meeting.
No report was submitted.
AI: Shane prepare a resolution to move XML to the Attic
No report was submitted.
AI Bertrand: discuss Attic with Gianugo
No report received.
Shane is following up, the issue is the status of XML Common files. The board is expecting an attic resolution.
The big news from the XML project is that we finally managed to start the process of moving XIndice to the Attic. The vote just passed, and the move will start in the next few days. Once we are done with that, it will be time for a last call to the various xml-related projects to see what we should do with the existing xml web properties (DTDs and other resources), then we will be able to fold the XML project altogether. No other issues requiring board attention at this time.
No issues requiring board attention, other than the fact there are no issues and no activity at all in the XML project. It's probably time we ask (what's left of) the XIndice community what they want to do with their project, and move the XML umbrella to the Attic. Will try and find cycles before the next report to make it happen and/or find closure.
No issues requiring board attention at this time - and actually no issues at all in what is now to all extent a dormant project. Will try and tackle how to deal with XIndice (spin off? attic?) for the next board report. In the meantime, the XIndice mailing list is still attended and questions are being answered.
No report was submitted this month (and last time as well).
Action item: Jim prepare the box for storage in the Attic.
Quiet quarter, as usual, in XML-land. No issues requiring board attention, no new releases, no new committers. And no work on the way forward, that is what happens now that XIndice (where no development activity is happening, though lists are monitored and questions answered) is the only project left.
This quarter Crimson officially left the XML project on its way to the Attic. This leaves the XML project with just XIndice left. Consensus is to have a discussion within (what's left of) the XIndice community to see what's next, with three option on the table: XIndice goes TLP, xml.apache.org is renamed to XIndice or XIndice moves to the Attic. Another discussion will then ensue on what to do about the XML PMC and its only remaining asset, that is the xml.apache.org website. Development activity on Xindice remains low, however all questions on user's list are answered.
Should the XML project take responsibility for consolidating the web presence of all XML projects? Perhaps, but the projects need to be in order before the consolidation, specifically DOAP files for each release that is made. Currently there is no guideline to update DOAP files as part of the release process, although many projects have this in place.
Approved by general consent.
No issues requiring board attention for the XML project, which has been dormant as usual. No releases or committers in Xindice, yet the very few requests on the mailing list are being answered, and bugs are being fixed. Next quarter will hopefully see Crimson moving to the Attic.
The XML project is cozy and quiet, with no issues requiring board attention. Since the last report, Xang has been moved to the Attic and it is expected that Crimson will follow shortly. If the board has spare cycles, suggestions on what to do when the XML project becomes the home for XIndice alone are welcome. No releases, no new committers, very little development activity on XIndice (though the list are monitored and questions answered).
Greg suggests that when this project is down to simply managing XIndice, it simply gets renamed.
No issues requiring board attention in the XML project which has been pretty much dormant as usual. From the good news department, we voted to move Xang to the Attic, with Crimson to follow in the next quarter. This quarter there were few fixes on Xindice trunk, one due to Gump nagging. Few emails on users list, all were answered.
The XML project has been, as usual, pretty quiet this quarter, although we just managed to finally start the process to move AxKit to the Attic. On top of being a good news in itself, it's also comforting to see that the PMC was able to come up with a valid vote: that is a good sign that PMC members haven't dropped the ball, and lack of activity is mostly due to lack of actual work to do. Now that, with the departure of AxKit, the XML project is left with just one project (XIndice) and the xml.apache.org website, a discussion is in order as to what to do next - food for next quarters. Xindice had minimal activity this quarter. Several questions answered on user list, and that's all. No other issues require the board's attention.
No business requiring board attention from the XML PMC, other than the usual issue of AxKit being AWOL. To that extent an initial ping has been sent to the Attic to solve the AxKit issue once and for all (although it's somewhat worrisome that no one from the XML PMC or the Attic PMC cared to comment on it). XIndice ====== This quarter, Gump got to the task of building Xindice for the first time in the last 3 years. After sorting out issues with dependencies, Xindice was successfully built by Gump. Everything else is as usual: Xindice 1.2 is in maintenance; no development happened on 1.3 during this quarter; all emails to the user list are answered promptly.
From a general business perspective, not much is happening in the XML project. Jeremias Maerki is working with various pre-XML-now-TLD communities to fix a few inconsistencies in the XML website, and no topic requiring the PMC attention has been brought up. Now that Attic is in place, next quarter could be a good timing to consider moving AxKit there (also considering they failed to report, again). Xindice is been quiet this quarter, with minor activity on users list and in SVN.
General ====== Nothing specific requiring board attention, though it should be noted that the PMC seems decreasingly active and responsive (then again, there is little to do). XIndice ====== Xindice development this quarter has picked up and we are getting closer towards next planned release (1.2). Questions on users mailing list are getting answered. AxKit ==== AxKit is getting into a serious problem, as it failed to report despite direct pings to Matt Sergeant. The project seems pretty stalled anyways, with no real community to speak of. There is, however, some development going on in a project dubbed "axkit2" - casual signs of life are visible at http://trac.axkit.org/axkit2 On one hand, this happens outside the foundation, OTOH, it seems to be a different project. AxKit, at the moment, makes a great candidate for the upcoming Apache Attic.
Aaron to work with the PMC on behalf of the Attic.
General business ============= Things are quiet as usual. No changes in the PMC structure. Please see below for a potential issue with AxKit that might require the board attention/support. XIndice ====== XIndice has been quiet this quarter. Users questions are answered, not much development going on. AxKit ==== As pointed out by Jeremias Maerki there seems to be a problem with AxKit. Note that, to start with, the AxKit representative (Matt Sergeant) failed to report and, specifically, to provide a response to a few issues that Jeremias noted. Given the lack of responsiveness by Matt, it's probably the case for the PMC to approach the AxKit community at large and ask them to provide a new contact and/or discuss the project future. To provide more context, here is what Jeremias noted: ====== Well, if I look at the AkKit mailing list, the project is almost dead. A couple of commit messages indicate that the source code is not hosted on ASF hardware anymore as is policy. For example: http://trac.axkit.org/axkit2/changeset/259 No commits in the last 22 months in the ASF SVN: https://svn.apache.org/viewvc/xml/axkit/ The website has never been moved to ASF hardware, AFAIK. It looks to me as if Matt has taken development elsewhere. There's even a mailing list on axkit.org where more is going on than on the ASF list. http://axkit.org/archive/index.xml?year=2008;month=7 IMO, AxKit should be retired on ASF hardware. If Matt wants to continue elsewhere as he seems to be doing, that's fine. But that would be without the ASF logo I guess. At any rate, AxKit doesn't behave like a normal ASF project. Matt, any comments?
If Gianugo doesn't get a reply from Matt, the board suggests that Gianugo contact Justin Mason as he has indicated that he knows how to contact Matt.
From a general point of view, there is very little to report for the XML project. No activity at the PMC level, and no particular issues requiring board attention. Everything is quiet in Xindice with the exception of few bug fixes. Occasional questions on users mailing list are getting answered. No activity to report for AxKit.
General business ============== Nothing much going on in the XML project. We are waiting to see what happens with Apache Attic to see if either Xindice or AxKit might be good candidates. The Export Notification Policy reminder from the board didn't show anything to be done from the XML PMC side. Nothing else requiring board attention at the moment. Xindice ====== Xindice made a 1.2m1 release on December 1st. There has been little activity since then. AxKit ==== Nothing new to report - no activity since last time.
Approved by General Consent.
General business: ============== Things are quiet in the XML project, with no issues requiring board attention. Migration of AxKit->perl PMC and Xindice->DB PMC did not take place yet. Xindice ====== Works is going on on next (1.2) release. There are plans to produce 1.2 milestone release in coming weeks. Traffic on user list is low but all questions are answered. AxKit ===== Didn't submit a report. Need to figure out if Matt Sergeant is still around and, if not, get a new representative.
Henri to request report specifically on AxKit issue for next month.
Approved by General Consent.
** General: Things are quiet as always in XML-land, with no issues requiring board attention. Migration of AxKit to perl.apache.org is still due. ** Xindice Xindice development is increasing. After our last quarter release, we added a new commiter (Natalia Shilenkova) and there has been some development activity going on, with patches and new features planned.
Approved by General Consent.
The XML PMC has been quiet as usual, and possibly more. It's definitely time to get our act together and start shaping the future (whatever that means). The good news is the long-awaited release of Xindice 1.1, which started some nice discussion and activity on the xindice-dev list: looks like the project isn't quite dead, and it's worth pursuing more development on that side of the pond. The bad news is that it's been hard to get the required PMC vote to release the software, as the very few members that hang around don't seem to be active anymore. We needed a somewhat "liberal" interpretation of what is a +1 to actually have the green light and get the release out of the door. Given there were many contributions recently (since 2006/11) from one user - patches to existing bug reports, as well as new bug fixes and enhancements - we might want to take a note and possibly add another committer in the future. It would also help a lot if we can add a third Xindice committer to the PMC - this would resolve our inability to do releases due to overall low activity of XML PMC. Currently, the XML PMC bylaws allow a maximum of two committers per project, but this is clearly something that needs to be changed. This said, the move of AxKit is definitely planned for the next quarter, after having being delayed way too much, while it might be worth considering what to do with Xindice given the recent activity burst.
It was noted that the "maximum of two committers" in the XMP PMC Bylaws seems a significant deviation from standard ASF methods. The board will strongly recommend that those bylaws be amended.
Approved by General Consent.
General business ================ Things are generally quiet and almost dormant on the XML PMC. No activity to report: the Axkit->mod_perl and Xindice->DB migration has not taken place, something I hope to be able to tackle in the upcoming months. No other issues to report. Axkit ===== AxKit2 continues at a steady pace. Some bugs fixed this period, though no releases made. Community activity is slowly increasing again, which we're grateful for. No activity on AxKit1. XIndice ======= Xindice: There was some development activity attending bugzilla issues. Getting closer to a release state. Little user activity.
There was discussion regarding the board's understanding that the XML Project was "going away". Sander noted that it hinges on the migration of Axkit and Xindice, which could be sped up.
Approved by General Consent.
General business: ============== As usual, things are quiet in the XML project. Generally speaking, it's worth noting that the process of moving XML projects to different PMC has started, with the recent vote that moved XML Commons under the Xerces umbrella. During the next quarter we expect to move Xindice to DB and Axkit to Perl. Other than that, no news to report. Xindice: ======= Xindice user's list is quiet, as usual, but there is some BugZilla and SVN activity on the developer's list. As bug list shrinks, possibility for the next release increases. AxKit: ===== AxKit2 development is going well, but has stalled while the developers concentrate on "real life" for a bit. People are developing apps for it and using it. We intend to do one more release of AxKit1 to fix a few niggling bugs.
Approved by General Consent.
General business ============== A discussion is ongoing on the XML PMC with regard to the board suggestion to dismantle the PMC sending the projects to various other PMCs. While there is general agreement on moving forward, there have been a few proposals/discussions, the most important issues belonging to XML Commons, which might be split between Jakarta and Xerces/ Xalan, the third option being pursuing the "external API" project as discussed on the incubator list. A few concerns have been raised here and there about other stuff, such as what to do with hibernated/dead projects (Crimson, Xang, Xerces 1, stylebook) and how to deal with the committer issue (case in point being XML Commons Resolver, which is still somewhat maintained by Norm Walsh). Moreover, there is the issue of what to do with the site and the federation idea as a whole (makes sense to keep a PMC just for that?) All things considered, a possible roadmap is the following: - move AxKit ASAP (there is consensus both from Matt and from the Perl PMC) - move Xindice (even though it might be worth considering if it makes sense to keep it alive at all) - talk about the issues with XML Commons and try to find a solution - decide what to do with regard to the federation altogether AxKit ==== AxKit: Major progress at last! Aside from a couple of patches to AxKit 1.x (to support the new XML::LibXML/LibXSLT callbacks, and support xsp:expr returning complex structures), I have started work on AxKit2 and got a remarkable amount of work done. AxKit2 is entirely different from 1.x. It is no longer built on mod_perl (or Apache). It comes as a self contained httpd, so that installation is a matter of extracting the tarball and running "./ axkit". So far we have XSP and XSLT working, and a patch for XPathScript coming (waiting to find out CLA status). Xindice ====== Todd answered couple of questions on user list; and that's it for a current quarter. XML Commons ============ Only very few minor tweaks on the JAXP code. Nothing else happened.
Approved by General Consent
General ======= Things have been overall very quiet on the XML project. Unfortunately, it's hard to say that no news is good news in this case: the lack of real stuff happening around the project means that the current status of the PMC can be hardly described as functional. Basically, it seems that the attention threshold from the current PMC members has dropped, which is understandable given - again - the lack of activity. While there's nothing intrinsically bad in having a quasi-dormant PMC if the situation is stable, it should be noted that it might be hard in the future to gather attention on urgent items, given how producing this report has been tough in terms of having to ask people several times to get the required information and failing partly at it (AxKit didn't submit any status update). Also, the XML Commons report suggests that the PMC isn't quite doing its job in terms of oversight. It's probably worth considering what the natural evolution of the XML PMC should be in the next few months. XML-Commons =========== Some minor changes in Externals. Externals has been tagged for versions 1.2.05 and 1.3.03 but this release wasn't sanctioned by the PMC which is a little disturbing as the XML PMC is the responsible entity for XML Commons. I assume this was done as part of the Xerces 2.8.0 release, so if the Xerces PMC properly followed due dilligence, no real harm is done. Discussions started about adding JAXP 1.4 support to Externals. There has been an exchange with the XMLBeans PMC which maintains a copy of the JSR 173 (StAX) API. Some origin and legal issues are being investigated. The XML Resolver enjoyed a few bugfixes and improvements after a longer sleeping period. XML-Security ============ XML-Security is working towards a 1.4 release for the Java library with the JSR-105 interface code. A 1.3 release is planned for the C++ library with a complete XKMS message set implementation. The project is also looking to be promoted to TLP status status as well. There will be a vote on the security list, and a discussion on pmc@xml in order to get it to the board, possibly by June. Xindice ======= Xindice got a new committer (Todd Byrne) in March; other than that - nothing to report. Axkit ==== No report received from the AxKit PMC members. A quick glance to the mailing lists reveals an almost dormant project, should be safe to assume no activity to report.
It was noted that the XMP Security Subproject will likely request TLP in the very short term.
Approved by General Consent.
1. General The XML PMC is undergoing maintenance. It seems that a good deal of current PMC members is MIA, since they never answered a couple of roll calls. It has been suggested to vote inactive members out, as per the #5.9 of the PMC charter, but a suggestion from the board about the proper course of action is most welcome. We have 20 members listed in our PMC, yet, these 10 guys failed to respond when asked if/ how they were about: Scott Boag <sboag@apache.org> (*) Kip Hampton <khampton@totalcinema.com> Vincent Hardy <vincent.hardy@sun.com> (*) Brian Minchau <minchau@ca.ibm.com> (*) Steven Noels <stevenn@outerthought.org> (*) Santiago Pericas-Geertsen <santiagopg@apache.org> Joerg Pietschmann <j3322ptm@yahoo.de> Jason Stewart <jason@openinformatics.com> Erwin van der Koogh <erwin@koogh.com> PeiYong Zhang <peiyongz@ca.ibm.com> The PMC continues to have oversight on the various projects, even though we have just one guy looking after, respectively, XML Security (Berin) and Axkit (Matt). Given the general lack of activity on the projects, this isn't a major issue as of now, but it's expected that a heavy reshuffle of the PMC takes place in the next quarter. Andy Clark and Ted Leung have left the PMC. 2. Subproject reports a. XML Commons Almost no activity, except for the addition of a branch to XML Commons. External which now contains the W3C-licensed sources Apache Batik needs. The branch was created due to possible problems with the JAXP 1.3 TCK. b. Xindice Almost no activity either. Vadim keeps maintaining the current codebase, but with few, in any, interest from the community. c. XML Security Work has continued on integrating the JSR-105 code, and this is now complete. In addition there have been the standard run of bug fixes on both the C++ and Java code bases. d. AxKit No activity to report.
Approved by General Consent.
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed Berin
Lautenbach to the office of Vice President, Apache XML Project,
and
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the
resignation of Berin Lautenbach from the office of Vice
President, Apache XML Project;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Berin Lautenbach is
relieved and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of
the office of Vice President, Apache XML Project, and
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Gianugo Rabellino
be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President,
Apache XML Project, to serve in accordance with and subject to
the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the
Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or
disqualification, or until a successor is appointed.
Resolution 6A, Change the Chair of the Apache XML Project, was
approved by Unanimous Vote.
Overview ======== Very little project level activity in the past quarter. Gianugo Rabellino has volunteered to take on the role of the PMC chair, with the consensus of the PMC. A resolution is to be presented to the board for their vote in the November meeting and is attached as Appendix A to this report. Commons ======= Only minor tweaks in Externals, no other activities worth mentioning. No releases. The move of some external classes from Batik to XML Commons Externals is still to be done. Axkit ===== AxKit 1.7 released (yay!) Waiting for infrastructure to migrate us to SVN. Started some coding on AxKit 2.0 (for apache2) Xindice ======= All is quiet. No releases XML-Security ============ 1.3 of the Java library released. Some discussion about reviving JuiCE. A number of bug reports on the C++ library. [ Appendix A was inserted as agenda item 6.A. ]
Overview ======== Again, the PMC and general lists have been very quiet. Everyone has been too busy on other things to look at how to move the overall federation forward. Given a high work load elsewhere, the chair of the PMC has announced his intention to resign for the chair. This appears to be an ideal opportunity to reconstitute the PMC now that the Federation has been running for a while and get some new people in who are focussed on the Federation itself. Commons ======= XML Commons has been migrated to SVN. XML Commons Externals is now updated to the latest JAXP version 1.3 and released, after bugfixes, as 1.3.02 (which is used by the latest releases of Xerces-J 2.7.1 and Xalan-J 2.7.0). It is planned to move additional W3C-licensed packages to Externals from Batik. There are no other events worth mentioning for the other parts of XML Commons (Resolver for example). They have been very quiet in the last quarter. Axkit ===== AxKit is preparing for a 1.7 release in the very near future, and is going through a testing phase in preparation. Once the release is out, the code base will be converting to SVN. We're also investigating a new codebase for AxKit 2.0, but this is preliminary stages just now. Xindice ======= Xindice was converted from CVS to Subversion, site updated to reflect this. Little developer activity this quarter, most questions on user list are anwered. One of those who are answering questions is Todd Byrne <byrne@cns.montana.edu>, who is also author of several patches. He is on the short 'committer candidates list'. XML-Security ============ Version 1.2 of the The C++ library has been released, and includes new code for XKMS message handling code. Since the release, a large amount of work has been concentrated on optimisation of the library to better handle "normal" use cases. For the Java library, a 1.3beta has been cut, incorporating the new JSR 105 API + a number of performance improvements.
Jim noted that according to the report, it appears that the project may be in danger of stagnation. The report notes that people are "too busy" for example. However, the report also states that they hope to reinvigorate the project.
Approved by General Consent.
Overview ======== As the project gets smaller, the quarters get quieter. Xerces is now a TLP in its own right. The only remaining sub projects that *may* look to TLP status are xml-security and AxKit. The PMC and general lists have been very quiet. Everyone has been too busy on other things to look at how to move the overall federation forward, however this needs to start happening, and will be a focus for the chair in the coming quarter. Commons ======= Main news from Commons is the JAXP 1.3 donation from Sun has gone ahead, and the code has been imported in the repository. Lots of good work from a number of parties to work through this. Axkit ===== AxKit has just taken a vote for its next release, and is planning to make this happen. Preparation for moving to SVN has also now commenced. Finally, AxKit is preparing to migrate its mailing lists back into a single list. The volumes are too low to warrant maintaining the current dev/user split. Xindice ======= Some activity on the user list, however no development activity. XML-Security ============ Version 1.2.1 for the Java library was released in this quarter. This included a number of bug fixes from 1.2. The C++ library is preparing for a 1.2 release (vote currently being undertaken) which will include the new XKMS message handling code.
Apache XML Project report approved as submitted by general consent.
Overview ======== For the XML project it's been a quiet quarter. Xerces is ready to become a TLP and is putting a resolution to the board for this quarter. That will be almost the last of the major developments (other than AxKit) in the XML project to be proposed for TLP status. A big (and long) effort, and a huge thanks from the PMC (and particularly myself!) to all who have done the extra yards to make it happen. The XML project itself now needs to have an internal review to determine where to from here. The web site has been very quiet, and the PMC list similarly - most activity has now moved to the PMC lists for the new projects. In addition, we need to work out what makes most sense for the "federation". Commons ======= The only major action currently is waiting for Sun to complete legal review of their expected donation of the JAXP 1.3 sources (note: these are upgrades to existing JAXP sources donated in the past, and should not need incubation). This is expected to come through, but has been slow getting the details finished. The Xerces and Xalan teams are both eagerly awaiting this JAXP 1.3 code so they can update to the latest specs. Xerces-J ======== In November, Xerces committers and members of the XML PMC voted to transform Xerces into a top-level project. Initial PMC members for the Xerces top-level project were also selected. This will be on the agenda of the February Board meeting. The community is still awaiting donations for JAXP 1.3 from Sun Microsystems. It is hoped that any remaining hurdles for the software grant will be resolved between Apache and Sun soon, so that the integration work can begin followed soon after by the release of Xerces-J 2.7.0. Xerces-C ======== There is much current discussion around the content of the next Xerces-C release. It looks like the build system will be modernized, and various API additions/updates may also be carried out. Consensus hasn't yet been reached about whether the release will be Xerces-C 2.7.0 or 3.0. A vote has also been underway to add a new committer, Vitaly Prapirny; this idea has met with widespread support and the vote will be formally concluded shortly. Xerces-P ======== I've been seeking some kind of commercial sponsorship to continue my Xerces work, and I'm very close to actually getting some - we'll see how it turns out. There is a large memory leak issue that is requiring a restructuring of the code base, and because Xerces-P is going to be folded in as a sub-project of Xerces-C after the TLP transition, I've been holding off major changes. Axkit ===== The AxKit web server is now hosted in a data center (not Apache's own, but it's secure and free), meaning that downtime is much less likely. Unfortunately the migration was forced due to downtime at the last hosting place, so we were down for about a week. Most work is currently occurring in other people's projects (such as CMSs) outside of the AxKit project, but things are still healthy. Xindice ======= No activity in the past quarter XML-Security ============ A new committer - Milan Tomic - has been voted in, and will be assisting in the C++ version of the library. The Java library is heading towards a 1.2.1 release with a number of bug fixes. The C++ team has been involved in interoperability testing with the XKMS effort at W3C, and the C++ library now supports a complete X-KISS message set that has been shown to be interoperable with other XKMS libraries. This code will be released in the 1.2 version.
There was some discussion regarding the note that under AxKit, most work was being done "elsewhere." It was noted that AxKit is described as "healthy" but it was agreed that Dirk would investigate to see if there were any licensing issues.
Apache XML Project report approved as submitted by general consent.
General Comments ---------------- A reasonably quiet quarter. The foundation progresses, and XML Graphics (comprising Fob and Batik) and Xalan have now been approved by the board as TLPs. Activity has been picked up again for Xerces, so we are coming close to the end of the road. This report is not as complete as it normally would be. The delinquent PMC chair neglected to take into account the fact the board meeting was brought forward a week, and so has somewhat failed in his duty. Issues needing attention ------------------------ The JuiCE sub-project in the incubator is still waiting on action on the corpriate CLA from uni of memphis. Axkit ----- Due to the slowdown in the AxKit project, both in terms of community and the developers, we have decided to re-merge the dev and users lists to ensure that users are aware that we are actually doing some things to the code. I have emailed infrastructure with the request to migrate the users list to Apache infrastructure (currently hosted on my personal DSL line) so we can proceed with the merge. I await a response (unless it got lost by my spam filters). In the meantime bugs are being fixed, and we are working with the XML::LibXML developers to resolve the libxml input filters conflicts with other perl and PHP projects and should resolve that issue soon. We also need to work on migrating axkit.org to Apache infrastructure as I am moving to Canada in about 6 weeks and so the urgency of this has increased. I will try and coordinate with infrastructure@ on this. This is complicated by the hosting of a number of non-apache open source projects on the axkit.org domain. MattSergeant. Commons ------- Xerces-C++ ---------- Released Xerces 2.6 at the end of September. Many bug fixes. Moved to 2.0 license. Ongoing discussions ragrding moving Xerces to a top level project. Proposed charter being finalised now. Xerces-J -------- Xerces-J 2.7.0 is still a work in progress. The completion of this release is pending on the donation of the portions of JAXP 1.3 developed by Sun Microsystems for the JAXP 1.3 reference implementation. In October, Sun expressed their interest in donating this work to Apache and the community began discussing how best to integrate the code in Xerces (as well as in Xalan and XML-Commons). Our understanding is that Apache and Sun are attempting to work out the details of a software grant for this code, and that both parties are committed to the resolution of these issues. Since JAXP is of central importance to Xerces-J, the community ardently hopes that these final hurdles will be resolved soon so that we can begin the integration work and soon thereafter release Xerces 2.7.0. We have one new committer to report: Ankit Pasricha was voted in during the last weeks of October. Discussion has continued on the migration of Xerces-* to a top-level project. The composition and chairmanship of the PMC and the proposed charter are being reviewed and finalized. We're hopeful that a motion to transform Xerces to a TLP may be moved within days. Xerces-P -------- Xindice ------- XML-Security ------------ The Java library is now progressing towards a 1.2 release, with RC-1 currently being reported on by users. Work has been concentrating on an XKMS implementation within the C++ library, and Berin Lautenbach has been doing interoperability testing with the C++ code and the W3C workging group on the XKMS standard. We now have a full implementation of X-KISS and work has commenced on X-KRSS.
Apache XML Project approved by General Consent.
General Comments ---------------- The Federation of many of the sub-projects is slowly happening, although not as quickly as everyone might like. With the Graphics TLP proposal pending, we will now concentrate on moving Xerces and Xalan to TLP over the next quarter. PMC arrivals, departures ------------------------ With Forrest becoming a TLP, Jeff Turner <jefft@apache.org> requests that he be removed from the XML PMC. The request for the XML Graphics TLP (Batik and FOP) is pending. Issues needing attention: ------------------------- The JuiCE sub-project in the incubator is still waiting on action on the corpriate CLA from uni of memphis. Axkit ----- Vacation and conference season is upon us so not a lot has changed. Code in the 1.6.x branch remains more-or-less stable with a few bug fixes along the way. We added Michael Nachbaur as a core committer. Migration to TLP is stalled pending the confirmation of the new proposed PMC Chair and markup of the subsequent charter proposal. Perhaps the biggest non-technical news item in the last period was the release of XML Publishing with AxKit from O'Reilly (yay!). We also saw a noticable increase in interest in AxKit at this year's OSCon. Batik ----- Cameron McCormack? was added as a committer. Proposal for XML-Graphics joint TLP with FOP discussed. Working to update the source headers. No major code changes, some bug fixing, some enhancements to the handling of external documents. Commons ------- No major activity on xml-commons this quarter. Some small new code donations have been discussed briefly, but without a lot of followup. We need a few more committers to follow up and evaluate the ideas - especially to see if these kinds of things can just be added to xml-commons or if they'd actually need to go through the incubator. Some Xerces and Xalan committers have been bugfixing in some of the common components, so I hope we'll prepare a release for general use in the next month or so. Note we should ensure the community followsup on the status report from Xerces-J to ensure the JAXP changes they noted get committed properly. -- ShaneCurcuru FOP --- No big events, except for the discussions on the XML Graphics project and... Peter B. West moved off to SourceForge? with his special FOP branch, just like Victor Mote did earlier. This was a result of the inability of the community to decide on a common design approach for the new layout engine. On the other side, both Victor and Peter remain in contact with the FOP project. They have both signalled that they are pleased about the XML Graphics project and that they will support the creation of shared basic components. This will faciliate comparing the three different layout engines being developed right now and will ensure that as little code as possible will need to be duplicated. It is clear that this is not an ideal circumstance but there's no alternative visible right now. Xalan-C++ --------- A vote passed to move to Jira as the issue tracking system. This will happen in the near future. Other than that, just the usual bug fixes since the last status report. --BrianMinchau Xalan-J/XSLTC ------------- A vote passed to move to Jira as the issue tracking system. This will happen in the near future. Other than that, just the usual bug fixes since the last status report. --BrianMinchau Xerces-C++ ---------- Xerces-J Work has been continuing on Xerces 2.7.0. The current status is available here [*]. We understand that Sun intends to contribute the portions of the RI for JAXP 1.3 that were not developed in Apache back to Xerces-J and Xalan-J shortly; we hope to release Xerces 2.7.0 soon thereafter. We have one new committer to report: Neil Delima was voted in during the last weeks of May. The plan to migrate Xerces-* to a top-level project seems to be on a bit of a summer hiatus. Once everything moves back into high gear in the Fall, hopefully interest from the community will increase and this will pick up speed. [*] http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/xml-xerces/java/Xerces2.7.0-REL_PLAN.html Xerces-P -------- Nothing to report for this period. Xindice ------- Nothing to report for this period. Xindice will stay within XML PMC for now. XML-Security ------------ Two new committers have been voted in - Davanum Srinivas and Raul Benito. Raul has been doing a lot of work on optimising the library. In the C++ library we have been developing a server to allow interop testing of XML Key Management Specification (XKMS) using the Apache xml-security library. We are almost at the point where we can put an Alpha server online with full support for the XKISS (XML Key Information Service Specification). Once that is online, we will start looking at an XKRSS (XML Key Registration Service Specification) message set implementation.
Approved by General Consent.
General Comments A fairly quiet quarter on the overall project front, although good activity within most of the sub-projects. Much effort has gone into discussion around the Federation proposal, and this is where the PMC has been concentrating its efforts. The project has voted in a new sub-project - JuiCE?. This is a JCE provider based on OpenSSL? with an initial code-base donated by Internet2. It is ramping up in the Incubator, although sorting out CLAs for the initial committers has taken longer than expected. As we transition to a Federated model, it is likely that this will move with the XML-Security project - possibly into a security or crypto related TLP. XMLBeans is also getting closer to release from Incubator, and is currently working through how to ensure a balanced committer group. Again, the Federation issue has caused some discussion around whether XMLBeans will come out of the incubator as a TLP within the XML Federation, or as a sub-project to start with. PMC The PMC has been focussed on executing the Federation proposal. Four proposals are currently being concentrated on : * Xerces: There has been much discussion around how the language based parser implementations would come together in the overall project, and how other "sub-projects" might work in with them. This is not so much a discussion of whether or not it should be done as a discussion around how the mechanics will work. * AxKit: The AxKit team have done a lot of work detailing out an operating model for a new TLP. The team seems comfortable with the idea of a move, so I am hopeful we may have a resolution to put before the board at the next meeting. * XML Graphics: Batik and FOP are looking to create a consolodated PMC. Batik has been very quiet lately (all committers otherwise engaged), which has lead to discussions as to whether or not to just go with FOP in the intial move. * Xalan: This started up using the same model as Xerces. Fairly much on hold whilst we work through the issues with Xerces. Much of the effort with all of these has been around ensuring people are very clear about what this means and why it is being done. Most of the sub-projects are fairly comfortable with the way things work today and need to be comfortable that we are not causing them unnecessary overheads by heading down this path. My feeling has been that it is important to take as much time as it needs to ensure everyone is comfortable with what is going on, so I've not been trying to push people into moving fast. Issues needing attention: The JuiCE? effort needs to put a submission to BIS for exporting cryptographic code. We also need to make a submission to Sun requesting a code signing certificate (to enable the crypto in the provider in later JDKs). This will require a statement from the ASF indicating that we understand we are bound by the US export laws. Given we do understand this, the PMC chair will be signing on behalf of the ASF. Axkit Work continues toward a 1.7 release: * Optimized Provider class interfaces to reduce redundant processing during style extraction phase. * Fixed bug that resulted in undesireable redirection for certain URLs when the AxHandleDirs? option is set to On. * Accepted for review 2 user-submitted patches to extend the directory listing interface to allow for greater flexibility (richer metadata). * Additional smaller bug fixes/general code clean-up. Much discussion surrounding AxKit's potential migration to a Top-Level Project resulted in a consensus for a proposed Mission Statement and Project Guidelines. Details here: http://axkit.org/wiki/view/AxKit/TLPGuidelineProposal More informally, the AxKit development team and larger users community was excited to hear that one of our users, running modest hardware and the latest version of AxKit, was able to cope with the load associated with a good old fashioned Slashdotting without dropping a single request. Batik Some discussion has started on moving Batik to the XML Graphics Top Level Project. Commons There were no official releases in the Commons project recently. We have had some volunteers from Xalan helping out to migrate to the 2.0 license and fixing up some documentation. Note that if most XML projects decide to move to their own PMCs that Commons will need to be careful to either get enough attention from the PMC or should move to the Xalan PMC (since Xalan re-ships most of the 'common' code here). FOP 2 new committers: Clay Leeds and Simon Pepping. Still working slowly towards a 1.0 developer release with no date in sight, however. Changed to Apache Licence 2.0 for CVS HEAD and alt-design branch, the maintenance branch is frozen and hasn't been upgraded. Forrest We continue to make solid steps towards the 0.6 release: * Changed to Apache License 2.0 in source files and commenced investigation of the distributed libaries. * Lots of work has been done to eliminate the copying of resources during build time * Forrestbot2 nearly ready for general use * Build system refactorings * Working on a more maintainable skin configuration system * Commenced discsussion (i.e. at internal Proposal stage) about Forrest becoming a top-level project Xalan-C++ Xalan-C++ 1.8 was released on May 3, 2004. Xalan-C++ version 1.8 is an implementation of the W3C Recommendations for XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 and the XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0. It was tested for compatibility with the Xerces-C++ XML parser version 2.5.0. The release included: * Upgrade from Xerces-C 2.4 to Xerces-C 2.5 * Build support for the new platforms Cygwin, HP-UX 11.00 on Itanium * Project files for supporting Microsoft Visual Studio .NET * Additional changes to the Xerces Deprecated DOM support. This is another step towards phasing out the support for Xerces Deprecated DOM. Users are encouraged to modify their applications to interface with the new Xerces DOM support. For more information on the effects of these changes to your build environment, see http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/readme.html#xercesdepdom * Implemented optimizations to significantly improve the throughput of the ICU-enabled "format-number" function. * Changes in the XML Serializer, the serializer will no longer put a newline after the xml header tag unless indent="yes". See bugzilla 24304 and 28386. * Apache 2.0 License updates * Bug fixes Details are at http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/readme.html. A new committer, Dmitry Hayes, was nominated and voted in as a committer on Xalan-C++ on February 19, 2004. Xalan-J/XSLTC Xalan-J 2.6.0 was released in February 29, 2004 (yes the 29-th). It was tested for compatibility with the Xerces-Java XML parser version 2.6.2 which is packaged in the distribution. The release included: * The usual bug fixes * Improvement in translet initialization time * Addition of a translet versioning mechanism * Changes that allow XSLTC to use other DTM implementations * Changes in the XML Serializer, the serializer will no longer put a newline after the xml header tag unless indent="yes". See bugzilla 24304. * Addition of a TransformThread? sample that demonstrates how to use different transformers on different threads and in different modes. * Upgrade to Xerces-Java 2.6.2 * Elimination of "enum" as a name to allow compilation under JDK 1.5 * Upgrade to the Apache Software License Version 2.0 (some License clean up is continuing) Two new committers have joined, Sarah McNamara?, and Joanne Tong who were nominated and voted in as committers on Xalan-Java in late February, and early March of 2004. Xerces-C++ We released Xerces-C 2.5.0 on 16th February. This was primarily a bug fix release, but as binary compatibility was not maintained a major version number was used. We have switched over to using JIRA for issue tracking and all bugs have been moved across from Bugzilla. We have not yet migrated to the Apache 2.0 license; that is planned well in advance of the next release. Xerces-C 2.6.0 will be out in the late summer / early autumn. Extensive discussion has been occuring over how Xerces would operate as a top level project. Xerces-J On February 20th, we released Xerces-J 2.6.2. As well as containing a few performance improvements and several minor bug fixes, this release fixes several bugs which a number of users encountered with version 2.6.1. Soon after this release we successfully completed migration to the Apache 2.0 license. Recently the committers decided that we would adopt JIRA for issue tracking. Existing bug reports from Bugzilla have been migrated to JIRA. The next Xerces-J release, 2.7.0, is planned in the near future. Development items include the latest versions of SAX, DOM Level 3, JAXP and XInclude. In the last month or so, the committers in all the Xerces-* communities have been discussing the possibility of converting Xerces to a top-level project. We're hoping to have a resolution to present to the Board by the next meeting; the consensus so far has been that this is a good idea, though there are still some details with respect to organization that need to be worked out. Xerces-P Nothing to report for this period. No decision has been made on any level wheter Xerces-P should be made a sub-project of Xerces-C. Xindice * Changed to Apache License 2.0 * Obtained software grant for Xindice Eclipse plugin (currently in Attic) * Released Xindice 1.1b4 XML-Security Released 1.1 of both the C++ and Java libraries. In both cases, the major advance has been an implementation of the W3C's XML Encryption standard. A large amount of performance work has been done by Raul Benito. Finally, we voted in a new committer (Vishal Mahajan).
General Comments A fairly quiet quarter on the overall project front, although good activity within most of the sub-projects. Much effort has gone into discussion around the Federation proposal, and this is where the PMC has been concentrating its efforts. The project has voted in a new sub-project - JuiCE?. This is a JCE provider based on OpenSSL? with an initial code-base donated by Internet2. It is ramping up in the Incubator, although sorting out CLAs for the initial committers has taken longer than expected. As we transition to a Federated model, it is likely that this will move with the XML-Security project - possibly into a security or crypto related TLP. XMLBeans is also getting closer to release from Incubator, and is currently working through how to ensure a balanced committer group. Again, the Federation issue has caused some discussion around whether XMLBeans will come out of the incubator as a TLP within the XML Federation, or as a sub-project to start with. PMC The PMC has been focussed on executing the Federation proposal. Four proposals are currently being concentrated on : * Xerces: There has been much discussion around how the language based parser implementations would come together in the overall project, and how other "sub-projects" might work in with them. This is not so much a discussion of whether or not it should be done as a discussion around how the mechanics will work. * AxKit: The AxKit team have done a lot of work detailing out an operating model for a new TLP. The team seems comfortable with the idea of a move, so I am hopeful we may have a resolution to put before the board at the next meeting. * XML Graphics: Batik and FOP are looking to create a consolodated PMC. Batik has been very quiet lately (all committers otherwise engaged), which has lead to discussions as to whether or not to just go with FOP in the intial move. * Xalan: This started up using the same model as Xerces. Fairly much on hold whilst we work through the issues with Xerces. Much of the effort with all of these has been around ensuring people are very clear about what this means and why it is being done. Most of the sub-projects are fairly comfortable with the way things work today and need to be comfortable that we are not causing them unnecessary overheads by heading down this path. My feeling has been that it is important to take as much time as it needs to ensure everyone is comfortable with what is going on, so I've not been trying to push people into moving fast. Issues needing attention: The JuiCE? effort needs to put a submission to BIS for exporting cryptographic code. We also need to make a submission to Sun requesting a code signing certificate (to enable the crypto in the provider in later JDKs). This will require a statement from the ASF indicating that we understand we are bound by the US export laws. Given we do understand this, the PMC chair will be signing on behalf of the ASF. Axkit Work continues toward a 1.7 release: * Optimized Provider class interfaces to reduce redundant processing during style extraction phase. * Fixed bug that resulted in undesireable redirection for certain URLs when the AxHandleDirs? option is set to On. * Accepted for review 2 user-submitted patches to extend the directory listing interface to allow for greater flexibility (richer metadata). * Additional smaller bug fixes/general code clean-up. Much discussion surrounding AxKit's potential migration to a Top-Level Project resulted in a consensus for a proposed Mission Statement and Project Guidelines. Details here: http://axkit.org/wiki/view/AxKit/TLPGuidelineProposal More informally, the AxKit development team and larger users community was excited to hear that one of our users, running modest hardware and the latest version of AxKit, was able to cope with the load associated with a good old fashioned Slashdotting without dropping a single request. Batik Some discussion has started on moving Batik to the XML Graphics Top Level Project. Commons There were no official releases in the Commons project recently. We have had some volunteers from Xalan helping out to migrate to the 2.0 license and fixing up some documentation. Note that if most XML projects decide to move to their own PMCs that Commons will need to be careful to either get enough attention from the PMC or should move to the Xalan PMC (since Xalan re-ships most of the 'common' code here). FOP 2 new committers: Clay Leeds and Simon Pepping. Still working slowly towards a 1.0 developer release with no date in sight, however. Changed to Apache Licence 2.0 for CVS HEAD and alt-design branch, the maintenance branch is frozen and hasn't been upgraded. Forrest We continue to make solid steps towards the 0.6 release: * Changed to Apache License 2.0 in source files and commenced investigation of the distributed libaries. * Lots of work has been done to eliminate the copying of resources during build time * Forrestbot2 nearly ready for general use * Build system refactorings * Working on a more maintainable skin configuration system * Commenced discsussion (i.e. at internal Proposal stage) about Forrest becoming a top-level project Xalan-C++ Xalan-C++ 1.8 was released on May 3, 2004. Xalan-C++ version 1.8 is an implementation of the W3C Recommendations for XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 and the XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0. It was tested for compatibility with the Xerces-C++ XML parser version 2.5.0. The release included: * Upgrade from Xerces-C 2.4 to Xerces-C 2.5 * Build support for the new platforms Cygwin, HP-UX 11.00 on Itanium * Project files for supporting Microsoft Visual Studio .NET * Additional changes to the Xerces Deprecated DOM support. This is another step towards phasing out the support for Xerces Deprecated DOM. Users are encouraged to modify their applications to interface with the new Xerces DOM support. For more information on the effects of these changes to your build environment, see http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/readme.html#xercesdepdom * Implemented optimizations to significantly improve the throughput of the ICU-enabled "format-number" function. * Changes in the XML Serializer, the serializer will no longer put a newline after the xml header tag unless indent="yes". See bugzilla 24304 and 28386. * Apache 2.0 License updates * Bug fixes Details are at http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/readme.html. A new committer, Dmitry Hayes, was nominated and voted in as a committer on Xalan-C++ on February 19, 2004. Xalan-J/XSLTC Xalan-J 2.6.0 was released in February 29, 2004 (yes the 29-th). It was tested for compatibility with the Xerces-Java XML parser version 2.6.2 which is packaged in the distribution. The release included: * The usual bug fixes * Improvement in translet initialization time * Addition of a translet versioning mechanism * Changes that allow XSLTC to use other DTM implementations * Changes in the XML Serializer, the serializer will no longer put a newline after the xml header tag unless indent="yes". See bugzilla 24304. * Addition of a TransformThread? sample that demonstrates how to use different transformers on different threads and in different modes. * Upgrade to Xerces-Java 2.6.2 * Elimination of "enum" as a name to allow compilation under JDK 1.5 * Upgrade to the Apache Software License Version 2.0 (some License clean up is continuing) Two new committers have joined, Sarah McNamara?, and Joanne Tong who were nominated and voted in as committers on Xalan-Java in late February, and early March of 2004. Xerces-C++ We released Xerces-C 2.5.0 on 16th February. This was primarily a bug fix release, but as binary compatibility was not maintained a major version number was used. We have switched over to using JIRA for issue tracking and all bugs have been moved across from Bugzilla. We have not yet migrated to the Apache 2.0 license; that is planned well in advance of the next release. Xerces-C 2.6.0 will be out in the late summer / early autumn. Extensive discussion has been occuring over how Xerces would operate as a top level project. Xerces-J On February 20th, we released Xerces-J 2.6.2. As well as containing a few performance improvements and several minor bug fixes, this release fixes several bugs which a number of users encountered with version 2.6.1. Soon after this release we successfully completed migration to the Apache 2.0 license. Recently the committers decided that we would adopt JIRA for issue tracking. Existing bug reports from Bugzilla have been migrated to JIRA. The next Xerces-J release, 2.7.0, is planned in the near future. Development items include the latest versions of SAX, DOM Level 3, JAXP and XInclude. In the last month or so, the committers in all the Xerces-* communities have been discussing the possibility of converting Xerces to a top-level project. We're hoping to have a resolution to present to the Board by the next meeting; the consensus so far has been that this is a good idea, though there are still some details with respect to organization that need to be worked out. Xerces-P Nothing to report for this period. No decision has been made on any level wheter Xerces-P should be made a sub-project of Xerces-C. Xindice * Changed to Apache License 2.0 * Obtained software grant for Xindice Eclipse plugin (currently in Attic) * Released Xindice 1.1b4 XML-Security Released 1.1 of both the C++ and Java libraries. In both cases, the major advance has been an implementation of the W3C's XML Encryption standard. A large amount of performance work has been done by Raul Benito. Finally, we voted in a new committer (Vishal Mahajan).
Discussion and Approval tabled due to time constraints.
General Comments As requested by the Board, the XML Project has been looking at ways to improve oversite within the project. Much discussion has occurred in the PMC list around the proposal for federating the XML project. A vote has been undertaken over the last few weeks within the PMC to determine in-principle support this proposal (13 +1s, 1 -0, no -1s). The proposal is attached as Appendix A. The XML Project requests that the board consider this proposal. Should this be acceptable, the XML PMC will look to implement the plan over the coming quarter. Should it go ahead, this will be an interesting experiment in cooperation between multiple TLPs. If it works well, it could lead to the XML project becoming a community that other Apache TLPs use to foster new ideas, cross-polination and new projects. It is also a recognition that most of the sub-projects in XML have active, thriving developer communities that require no additional oversite from an "external" PMC. PMC The PMC has been concentrating on the board request to increase oversite. Some discussion on the Apache 2.0 license has also occurred as the sub-projects work on converting over. Issues needing attention: Re-Licensing The migration to the Apache 2.0 license has turned out to be a useful way to uncover discrepencies in code licensing. Some code has been found in the Xindice code base that didn't go through a software grant process. Similarly, some Sun code was found in Xalan-J (looks like it was there in the initial code import). In the latter case, it was determined the 2 files are not used within Xalan-J, and the code was immediately removed from CVS by infrastructure@apache. In the former case, the Xindice team is following up with the owners of the code to formalise their donation. Commons We need to ask our JCP rep (or the board/licensing opinion?) about shipping JCP-derived interface-only releases - do they need to certify passing of the relevant TCK or not? Commons would like to ship some updated versions of the popular xml-apis.jar file, however it includes the interface files (but not any implementations) of the JAXP spec. If we only ship the interface, do we still have to pass the TCK? (<i>This may have been answered before, but I don't recall where). Note that Xalan and Xerces - which re-ship xml-apis.jar with their own implementations of JAXP - should already be independently passing the TCK. -- Axkit AxKit is trying to move towards a 1.6.3 release (we might call it 1.7) to include a few bug fixes, but most importantly to migrate to the new Apache 2.0 license. Work continues on AxKit 2.0 (to fit around the Apache 2.0 httpd). We are currently battling against porn spammers adding links to our Wiki. We have put some measures in place to prevent this so we hope to see this situation improving soon (it's certainly got my goat!). -- Batik Working on bug fixes and patches in preparation of the next stable release, 1.5.1. -- Commons No releases; very quiet on the xml-commons front. We do have some committers from Xerces and Xalan with interest in working on updating the common xml-apis that they (and many other ASF projects) share, but have not yet fully organized the volunteers. This may become a minor support issue with different projects getting slightly different XML interfaces, although it should be easy to fix them. Our previous Resolver release is proving to be popular, now officially shipping in Xerces as well as other products. Also: see the TCK issue under legal at the top of the report. -- FOP There were talks about the possibility of FOP and Batik to share some code and to go together under a new PMC (code-named "XML Graphics", see XML Federation Proposal). No releases, but the redesign has finally gained some momentum again. Three new committers: Finn Bock, Chris Bowditch and Andreas L. Delmelle. On the other side of the equation we lost a committer due to infighting. [ Editors Note - The loss of a committer in the sub-project was discussed inside the PMC. Whilst noy happy about the loss of a committer in such circumstances, the PMC is comfortable that the FOP developers are working through the issues ] -- Forrest Forrest has been progressing slowly but steadily towards 0.6, kept afloat by the usual small band of developers. Changes include: * almost all copying during build has been eliminated * many skin improvements, and a new skin (tigris-style) has been added * skin configuration is more flexible * Javasrc from Alexandria provisionally adopted in the scratchpad * Forrestbot2 nearly ready for general use * Build system refactorings Ross Gardler was voted in as committer in December. Updating to ASL 2.0 has been discussed but not yet implemented (no problems anticipated). -- Xalan-C++ Xalan-C++ 1.7 became available on January 19, 2004. Xalan-C++ version 1.7 is an implementation of the W3C Recommendations for XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 and the XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0. It was tested for compatible with the Xerces-C++ XML parser version 2.4.0. Changes for this release include: * Bug fixes * Message localization support * Build improvements * New EXSLT functions Details are at http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/readme.html. A new committer, Matthew Hoyt, was nominated and voted in as a committer on Xalan-C++ in December 2003. -- Xalan-J/XSLTC The committers continue to fix reported bugs. Voting has started on the having a new release, 2.6.0 in the near future. A new committer, Bhakti Mehta was nominated and voted in as a committer on Xalan-Java in January. -- Xerces-C++ 2.4.0 was released in Dec, 2003, with lots of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and new features such as PSVI support, stateless grammar and grammar serialization/deserializaton. 2.5.0 is to be released in weeks. -- Xerces-J It's been a relatively busy time in the Xerces-J subproject since the last report in November. On November 21, 2003, we released Xerces-J 2.6.0 which included the finalization of the XML Schema API (which was recently published as a W3C Member Submission), as well as implementing: DOM L3 Core & Load/Save? CR, XML 1.1 PR, Namespaces in XML 1.1 PR and SAX 2.0.1. On Jan. 30, Xerces-J 2.6.1 was released, featuring support for OASIS XML Catalogs, well-formedness checking for LSSerializer (DOM Level 3) and an experimental implementation of the XML Inclusions (XInclude) W3C Last Call Working Draft excluding support for XPointer. XML Catalogue support was implemented by leveraging the XML Commons 1.1 component, the jar of which we now distribute. The committers also decided that this would be the last Xerces-J release that will run on JDK 1.1. We also added a new committer, Kohsuke Kawaguchi. -- Xerces-P Only minor work has been done this quarter. There were a number of major memory leaks reported for the latest version of the code that have not been tracked down. It was first determined that these were not the fault of Xerces-C. Due to important bug fixes in the upcoming Xerces-C-2.5 release no attempt is being made to release Xerces-P-2.4, but instead we will focus on making 2.5 available. -- Xindice Thanks to the impressive work of Vadim, Xindice has finally a 1.1. release on radar. A beta has been officially released already, and work is progressing steadily, even if it's mostly a one man show (but thanks so much anyway!) of Vadim. Code is being migrated to ASL 2.0 license, which raised a possibly important legal issue about a previous donation of an Eclipse GUI (Attrezzo for Xindice) which didn't seem to follow the proper way of entering Apache: this needs to be sorted out ASAP and, in any case, before the final release. Finally, no new committers were added from the last board report. -- XML-Security Only minor activity in the last quarter. Bug fixes and moving code to new license. We have also sent e-mails to BIS notifying them of our intent to release encryption code. The current plan is to release betas of the Java and C++ libraries with Encryption code this quarter.
Approved via General Consent.
General Comments
================
Things have been relatively quiet on the broader project front. The
sub-projects are all going well, and the XMLBeans effort is now fully
into the incubation process.
xml.apache.org has now moved all sub-projects to using the ASF mirroring
system, and a consolodated download page has been created for all files
in the over-arching project. A fantastic effort from all concerned.
PMC
===
Membership
On the PMC membership front, Ilene Seelemann stepped down from the PMC
for personal reasons, and Brian Minchau stepped in as the replacement
Xalan representative. Erwin van der Koogh was also voted in to become
the replacement xml-security representative after Christian stepped down.
Oversight
Dirk recently raised the question of oversite of the Xerces-P
sub-project, particularly around releases of code. There is a feeling
that this is too much of a one man shop / no peer review/oversight or
peer-reviewed releases. Given that it is a thin layer on C++ we may
simply tie it in with xerces-c for the real releases. However this is
still under discussion.
As an input to this discussion, the PMC would like to understand the
board's position on the requirement of an umbrella PMC to vote on all
sub-project code-releases. Currently the XML PMC does not do this - we
rely on individual PMC members within each sub-project to ensure
appropriate processes are being followed.
Issues needing attention:
=========================
Legal
In the August report, we sought the endorsement of the board for the
sending of e-mails to submit notification of export of cryptographic
code for the xml-security Java and C++ libraries.
This was discussed, but no final conclusion was indicated on board@.
The e-mails below are proposed, and it is suggested (subject to board
approval) that these come from Berin Lautenbach as the chair of the XML
PMC.
We would also like to understand whether it is permissable (given recent
discussions between Ben Laurie and the FreeBSD folk) to release compiled
versions of the libraries.
EMAIL 1 - Java Code
To crypt@bis.doc.gov, enc@ncsc.mil, enc@ncsc.mil
Subject TSU NOTIFICATION
SUBMISSION TYPE: TSU
SUBMITTED BY: Berin Lautenbach
SUBMITTED FOR: Apache Software Foundation
POINT OF CONTACT: Apache's XML Security Project
PHONE and/or FAX: security-dev@xml.apache.org
MANUFACTURER: N/A
PRODUCT NAME/MODEL #: XML-Security-J Library
ECCN: 5D002
NOTIFICATION:
Web site - http://xml.apache.org/security/Java
CVS repository - http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/xml-security/src/
(When Released) http://www.apache.org/dist/xml/security/java-library/
NOTE: Current downloadable release code does not contain the new
XML-Encryption code, only digital signature code.
See CVS repository for new code.
EMAIL 2 - C++ Code
To crypt@bis.doc.gov, enc@ncsc.mil, enc@ncsc.mil
Subject TSU NOTIFICATION
SUBMISSION TYPE: TSU
SUBMITTED BY: Berin Lautenbach
SUBMITTED FOR: Apache Software Foundation
POINT OF CONTACT: Apache's XML Security Project
PHONE and/or FAX: security-dev@xml.apache.org
MANUFACTURER: N/A
PRODUCT NAME/MODEL #: XML-Security-C Library
ECCN: 5D002
NOTIFICATION:
Web site - http://xml.apache.org/security/c
CVS Repository - http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/xml-security/c/src/
Download directory - http://www.apache.org/dist/xml/security/c-library/
NOTE: Current downloadable release code does not contain the new
XML-Encryption code, only digital signature code.
See CVS repository for new code.
Axkit
=====
The cvs repository has been temporaily branched to allow for some
exploritory development into a new pipeline mechanism which will allow
for seamless incremental caching, cacheable logic sheets, automatic SAX
chaining and an easier pipeline extension mechanism. Since this work is
likely to change a number of the internal API's, it's been kept separate
from the core until the full impact of it can be accessed. Some fairly
intensive design sessions occured in the group in order to try and find
ways to support things such as SOAP and DAV more simply at the pipeline
level, and this work is expected to come to fruition as part of the new
pipeline design.
An initial port to Apache2 has been started with some success, but isn't
in a releasable state at the moment. This is currently on hold while we
decide whether we want the new pipeline code in for 2.0, so we can then
port it forwards.
A number of UTF-8 conversion bugs have been fixed in the core. These
manifested in users seeing Latin-1 characters output, while the encoding
declaration said UTF-8.
Work on adding a number of new transformation languages has started and
should be released soon, concerning mostly STX and TT2. The XSP engine
has been enhanced with XSLT-style interpolated attribute value templates.
Batik
=====
Implementation of the Batik distribution miroring. Nightly builds are in
place as well as release signing.
Large number of bug fixes. The team thinks SVG is now the only SVG
implementation we know of which passes all the W3C Test Suite tests,
excluding declarative animation.
The team is planning a 1.5.1 release after ApacheCon.
Commons
=======
We have released a beta of our popular Resolver component, and hope to
have a full 1.1 release out in time for version-matching with Ant which
points its users to the Resolver for optional tasks.
We also have the start of a plan in place to regularlize the version
numbering and releases of our external xml-apis.jar component. We hope
we can get the Xalan and Xerces teams to help us ship JAXP-TCK passed
versions of xml-apis.jar that can then be used across many ASF projects
that deal with XML.
-- ShaneCurcuru
FOP
===
We were finally able to freeze our maintenance branch so we can
concentrate on working on the redesign. As we have very few active
people in the Java department (that's different with support) progress
is slow. At least, we are starting to get feedback and even patches for
the redesign so we are on a good course in spite of the circumstances.
-- Jeremias Maerki
Forrest
=======
Forrest-0.5 was released in mid-September. Work on version 0.6 has so
far been focussed on re-organising the build process to be more
efficient. A new version of the forrestbot has begun. We continue to
update our version of Cocoon to stay just off the bleeding edge. This
has been useful for both projects. Progress on Forrest-0.6 has slowed a
little and some of the main committers must be occupied by other things.
The last report noted that all Cocoon committers are now Forrest
committers, but we have only seen one or two. There is also one new
Forrest committer. Some of the users seem to be de-lurking on the
mailing list, which is a good sign. No known license issues.
Xalan-C ++
==========
There were no new releases, so there was no functional change, however
Xalan-C++ did change its distribution to use the mirrors sites (see
http://xml.apache.org/mirrors.cgi or
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/xml/xalan-c).
-- Brian Minchau
Xalan-J/XSLTC
=============
Xalan-J 2.5.2 was released in late October 2003. The changes were:
* bug fixes (see http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/readme.html)
* downloading of Xalan-J moved to the various mirror sites around
the world (see http://xml.apache.org/mirrors.cgi or
http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/downloads.html ) which is also what
the other Apache projects did.
Unrelated to the 2.5.2 release, development work was started on the
xslt20-compiled branch to support XSLT 2.0 and Xpath 2.0 (both drafts)
with XSLTC.
-- Brian Minchau
Xerces-C++
==========
Xerces-C has 2 new committers. There have been many bug fixes and
considerable work is going into serializable grammars, stateless
grammars, PSVI and schema component model. The new memory management
scheme is now stable and we think the memory leaks have all been
plugged. Entity resolver support has now been enhanced. We hope to
release this year.
Xerces-J
========
In the last couple of months, considerable progress has been made in
tracking the DOM level 3 Core and Load/Save specifications. Our
XInclude implementation has also become considerably more correct and
complete. A new release will likely occur some time this month, which
will highlight these changes along with some work on performance.
Xerces-P
========
The Xerces-P project made a number of bug fix releases on the 2.3.0
stable release (2.3.0-2, -3, and -4). The main focus was smoothing out
the initial support for Windows and Mac OS X, and general project cleanup.
There is also now a win32 binary available for the project.
Also, the project switched over to SVN for maintain the source code, and
the project WWW site.
The project WWW page is now up-to-date, but has not yet migrated over to
using Forrest.
-- Jason Stewart
Xindice
=======
No particular progress in Xindice land. Still waiting to find time in
fixing documentation and packaging a release, but both the user and dev
lists have little or no traffic, and committers seem to be busy
elsewhere. A careful consideration about the future of this project
should be carried on: Xindice is widely used, yet it seems unable to
attract a stable and healthy developer community.
XML-Security
============
The XML-Security subproject has continued work on implementations of the
XML-Encryption standard. An alpha is nearly ready for public release for
the C++ library. Some work has also been done on the Java library, but
the pace here is slower.
Dirk noted that there were some issues with xerces-p; there's an ongoing discussion with how that project has no effective peer review, and no effective release process. The suggestion was made that it should be merged into xerces-C. Roy remarked that we've always required three +1's for a release, whereas Dirk noted that it's a problem if CPAN were to point to snapshots rather than releases.
Greg indicated that XML's question is whether they can leave release approval up to the PMC individuals on each project and it was noted that the three +1s should be committers, but don't have to be on PMC. This resulted in general discussion about how PMCs can be responsible for oversight. Roy stated that the issue came from himself, not the XML PMC, suggesting that they're not conducting enough oversight.
The general consensus was that oversight needs to be *active*, not just passive; Sam states that he can claim credibly that code is peer-reviewed, but not that the PMC is actively overseeing things.
Dirk will write mail to XML PMC saying that the board understands their problem, will clarify what oversight means, and that the XML project has gotten too big and we should split it up. And then cover the bases from every committer being a PMC member, to other options for oversight.
Reported accepted by general consent.
-- General Comments -- We've had a quarter with a fair bit of general activity. The XMLBeans product has been accepted into incubation by the project as a whole. The proposal generated a great level of discussion amongst the xml project community, and ended in a positive result, with a clear understanding of what issues the xml community feel need to be addressed during the incubation process. -- PMC -- The PMC has updated the charter document, and is going through a vote process to formalise this new version. This will hopefully be completed in the next few weeks. Christian Geuer-Pollmann retired from the PMC and a replacement has been nominated from the xml-security project (yet to be voted on within the PMC). ..................................................................... Issues needing attention: -- Legal -- The xml-security sub-project is starting work on C++ and Java implementations of the W3C XML Encryption standard. Whilst not implementing encryption algorithms directly, we will be making use of other libraries that have such functionality. After discussions with various parties within Apache, the xml-security team understands that working on such an implementation will not cause any export issues provided : * Only source code is released (i.e. no compiled versions of the libraries can be made available). * An e-mail is sent to Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) informing them of the location of the code available for download. The format of this email can be found at http://www.bxa.doc.gov/encryption/PubAvailEncSourceCodeNofify.html We seek the endorsement of the board for this approach, and would ask who such an e-mail should come from. -- Technical -- xml.apache.org projects need to take advantage of the ASF mirroring system. This will become more important as the infrastructure team begins moving services to our new server. The project is currently putting a plan together to do this over the next few months. ..................................................................... -- Axkit -- We recently released AxKit 1.6.2 (which included uploading a signed tarball to apache.org's servers <grin/>). This was a minor bug fix release, including features to "do the right thing" with external resources (such as file metadata) stored in non-utf-8 encodings, and adds attribute-value-templates to XSP. We have also added a unit test suite (thanks to Kip Hampton for finally taking the stand to do this) and it now runs nightly on axkit.org as a smoke test for new developments. Further work still goes into AxKit 2.0 (which will work only on Apache 2.0), and we expect a 1.6.3 release to be not too far around the corner due to a couple of important bug fixes in CVS. We also gained a new committer, Mike Chamberlain, who is working mostly on AxKit 2.0 now. -- Batik -- The Batik project had a release in July just prior to the SVG Open conference in Vancouver. The release came with a fairly large number of bug fixes, improvements and a lot of work on the test infrastructure. We will likely do a patch release in September as there have been a couple important improvements done by Thomas DeWeese? after the release and there are a few regressions to patch. -- Commons -- The xml-commons project has made slow and quiet progress. The Xalan-J and Xerces-J committers are collaborating on the xml-apis code to maintain a branch that can be used to pass the JAXP 1.2 TCK for their projects. We hope to make new maintenance releases soon of both the resolver and which utilities, which just need some docs/release manager volunteer time. - ShaneCurcuru -- FOP -- There was a FOP release, 0.20.5 in July which has a few improvements and bugfixes. This release is intended to be the last release from the maintenance code branch. Unfortunately, progress on the main code branch is very slow. The distribution directory has been migrated to the new location to make the downloads mirrorable. -- Forrest -- Forrest has been quietly progressing over the last few months. We hope to make a 0.5 release soon, and not before time since 0.4 was back in February. We have voted in 2 new committers. In addition, all Cocoon developers have been granted commit access, reflecting strong cross-project ties. No new dependencies or legal issues. -- Xalan-C++ -- Xalan-C 1.6 was released on 11 August. Highlights include: * "Sane includes" changes. * Bug fixes. * FreeBSD and NetBSD? ports * Faster UTF-8 and UTF-16 serializers. -- Xalan-J/XSLTC -- Xalan-J 2.5.1 was released in early June. The release included: * documentation updates and bug fixes (see http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/readme.html) * performance patches to the serializer and to XSLTC * An alternate binary distribution which contains XSLTC and Xalan-Interpretive in separate jar files. See: http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/downloads.html for more information on the packaging in the two distributions. A great deal of effort in the quarter was spent improving performance for the 2.5.1 release and beyond in the current version in CVS. The improvement has been noted by some of our users, which means that it is often more than a few percent. Finally, one new committer, Igor Hersht, was accepted into the subproject. -- Xerces-C++ -- Good progress being made. 2.4.0 planned for release in the autumn with new features including persistent grammars. No new committers. -- Xerces-J -- Xerces-J 2.5.0 was released in late July. As well as the usual plethora of bugfixes, this release marked the completion of Xerces-J's PSVI/XML Schema Component Model support via implementation of annotation components. The product was also upgraded to conform to the latest DOM level 3 Core and Load/Save? Working Drafts, and an experimental XInclude partial implementation was added. Finally, one new committer--K Venugopal--was accepted into the subproject. -- Xerces-P -- Xerces-P made an experimental 2.3 release. This included support for handling the config.status file of Xerces-C to improve cross platform support. Two announcements were made from users who successfully compiled the 2.3 release under Windows, however no binary release for windows is available yet. -- Xindice -- Xindice is still trying to put together the 1.1 release, so far with mixed results and a couple of failed attempts. The good news is that the community has got two new committers: Vadim Gritsenko and Kevin O'Neill joined Xindice in late July, and results are encouraging, with discussions and CVS commits flowing at a very good rate. -- XML-Security -- The XML-Security sub-project has just release version 1.0.0 of the C++ library, supporting the W3C XML Digital Signature standard. Work will now move to creating a C++ implementation of the XML Encryption standard. Work continues in the Java library to further develop encryption support. There has also been a fair amount of discussion around the potential legal ramifications for Apache of releasing a library that makes use of encryption algorithms. (See legal issues above.)
The report sparked discussion regarding the distribution of encryption code and hooks within ASF projects. Jim reminded the board of the legal opinion obtained by the HTTP Server Project back in September 2000 from McGlashan & Sarrail. Jim was to scan and commit the summary findings. Mark was to provide some background information as well.
The Apache XML Project Status Report was accepted as submitted and written by general consent.
WHEREAS, the membership of the Apache XML Project Management Committee (PMC) have nominated Berin Lautenbach to serve as chairman of the Apache XML PMC; and WHEREAS, the previously appointed chairman of the Apache XML PMC, Theodore Leung, has resigned his position as Vice President, Apache XML, in favor of Berin Lautenbach's appointment to that position. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Berin Lautenbach be and hereby is appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache XML, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed. This motion was accepted unanimously. At this point Sam Ruby left the meeting.
-- PMC No one from Batik wants to be on the PMC We need to finish revisions to the XML charter and elect a new PMC chair -- Axkit Work has begun on a port to Apache 2.0. This is going well, and is down to the niggly details. -- Batik Batik 1.5beta 5 was released on March 23, 2003. -- Commons Unfortunately there hasn't been much release work in Commons, although we could use a tagged and verified release of each of the components. I was hoping to get the subsetted documentation forrestized first but haven't had any time to work on it. Resolver has had several bugfixes, since no-one has complained with more problems we could definitely use a point release of this component. We have had some participation on the mailing list, including J.Pietschmann <j3322ptm@yahoo.de>'s proposed XInclude processor, which generated some good discussion with Xerces-folk and Cocoon-folk alike. We haven't had the critical mass yet to make the final decision, partly because we're trying to figure the proper home and usage for such a tool. One status question we should start to ask each project is also their status on getting mirrorable dists setup a'la Jakarta land; this is something we should be more organized about getting moving so we can better use the mirrors and save bandwidth. -- FOP No releases since last quarterly report. Release Candidate 3 of 0.20.5 is due in the next few days. This will be the last RC before the final 0.20.5 release which will also conclude the development (only bugfixing ATM) on the maintenance branch. All development after that will continue in HEAD (redesign). Progress in HEAD is slow. License issues with hyphenation pattern files are still pending. A test run for the whole license clean-up process where an author of an original hyphenation pattern file faxed in a grant document is still pending confirmation of grant receipt. Jeremias Maerki has pinged Jim Jagielski twice but got no response. Status of this process is here: http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?FOPAudits/March2003 -- Forrest -- Xalan-C ++ Xalan-C++ 1.5 was released on April 29. -- Xalan-J/XSLTC The XSLTC_DTM branch has been merged with the HEAD branch along with updated serializer code now used by both Xalan-J and XSLTC. These changes were released in Xalan-J/XSLTC 2.5.0 on April 14. The Xalan-J/XSLTC community is also happy to welcome three new committers: Lionel Villard, Arun Yadav and Brian Minchau! -- Xerces-C++ Xercesc2.3 is to be released on May 23, 2003 (as scheduled), which has these features (listed below) implemented: XML 1.1 Namespace in XML1.1 More DOM L3 Schema 1.0 Errata Pluggable Memory Manager Pluggable Security Manager Pluggable PanicHandler? Logical Path Resolution -- Xerces-J The last release of Xerces-J was 2.4.0, which emerged on March 27. We have had one person nominated for committer status in the last quarter, but, so far at least, that has only garnered two +1's (no -1's) so is stalled. There have been no recent major technical discussions in the community. -- Xerces-P -- Xindice No release since last quarter report: code is almost ready and stable, but documentation is missing and time from developers is quite short ATM. Anyway, the 1.1 release is expected sometime soon. No new committers were nominated during this timeframe, though someone has recently stepped up on the ML to volunteer in helping the Xindice team. Notable accomplishments during this period have been Gump integration and some work on unit tests. -- XML-Security The XML-Security project has released beta 0.2 of the C++ library, implementing XML Digital Signature support and is close to releasing a stable 1.00. Continuing work revolves around minor bug fixing and implementing a few remaining elements within the standard. From there, implementation will move to the XML Encryption standard. The Java library now has a beta implementation of the XML Encryption standard, and work continues in making this stable and ready for public release.
The following people have been added to the XML PMC to make
representation project based:
* Axkit
* Kip Hampton
* Matt Sergeant
* Commons
* Shane Curcuru
* FOP
* Peter B. West
* Jeremias Maerki
* Forrest
* Jeff Turner
* Steven Noels
* Xalan
* Ilene Seelemann
* Santiago Pericas-Geertsen
* Xerces-C
* Gareth Reakes
* PeiYong? Zhang
* Xerces-J
* Andy Clark
* Neil Graham
* Xerces-P
* Jason Stewart
* Xindice
* Gianugo Rabellino
* Kimbro Staken
Batik is in the process of finding a representative.
This report is the first from the new PMC.
Issues needing attention:
There is still a lot of confusion over licensing policy. The common
questions are:
1. Is is okay to use the short license
2. Can we include software that uses license foo
It would be a big help if these issues could be resolved by placing
the definitive answers on a web page.
--- Axkit
Following a short lull while various committers coped with the largely
uninteresitng details of Real Life, AxKit development has renewed with
vigor. Version 1.6.1 (a bugfix and minor features release) was
announced on Feb. 28th 2003 and we are currently accepting feature
requests for v 1.7
Recent highlights include:
* Release of version 1.6.1
* Public, Open Source release of the previously commercial-only
OpenOffice.org file format Provider (allows users to
trasparently publish/transform XML content form unaltered
OpenOffice documents).
* Revamped user Wiki and new volunteers to help manage it.
* Updated site design.
Perhaps the most exciting news from the last months (from a
non-rechnical point of view) is AxKit's appearance in February's
Security Space Apache Modules Report-- indicating a marked increase in
the number of sites running AxKit worldwide.
--- Batik
--- Commons
The xml-commons project has continued in it's slow growth over the
past quarter; with some luck and timing, we'll be doing a lot more in
the coming quarter.
The biggest news is our policy change to a per-tool release
system. Once we finish the appropriate doc work, we'll have releases
for each of the separate components we currently have in xml-commons:
xml-apis.jar, resolver.jar, and which.jar.
We've added one new committer, Norman Walsh, who donated his popular
XML catalog Resolver tool to the xml-commons project. We've had the
1.0 release of resolver.jar, and after incorporating user feedback
we'll have a second release very soon.
Development on the xml-apis.jar (the external, standards-based portion
of xml-commons: JAXP, SAX, and DOM interfaces) is taking place on two
main branches. The HEAD branch has mostly the latest-and-greatest code
of each standard; there isn't much current work happening here.
The primary work is happening on the tck-jaxp-1_2_0 branch, where
committers from both Xerces-J and Xalan-J are updating code to pass
the appropriate Sun-provided TCK test compatibility kit for JAXP
1.2. As soon as we have this finished, we'll have an xml-apis.jar
release that we know will pass the TCK and that any Apache projects
wish to use can pull down.
The other big news has been David Crossley's great work on
forrestizing the doc set for xml-commons, including working with the
forrest community to better support our multi-project doc needs.
--- FOP
* November 2002:
* New committer: Victor Mote
* EXSLFO: Community effort to standardize on XSL-FO
extensions among different XSL-FO implementations (EXSLT
as role model)
* December 2002:
* Version 0.20.5 Release Candidate
* January 2003:
* Kick off for "new FOP logo" contest (until the end of February)
* February 2003:
* Version 0.20.5 Release Candidate 2
FOP maintains 2 main development tracks:
* Maintenance branch: That's the branch where our current releases
come from. Version 0.20.5 is planned to be the last coming from
the maintenance branch. We're in bugfixing-only mode, as far as
this is possible because of our demanding users.
* Redesign in the trunk: Started about 16 (or so) months ago.
* A third branch is about the redesign of an important part of
FOP. It is expected to soon be integrated with the redesign.
Given our limited resources we're having trouble bringing the redesign
forward. From time to time the whole redesign descision is attacked
but lately, there wasn't enough power anymore to power that
discussion. So we hope that the whole team can concentrate on the
redesign once 0.20.5 is out (expected 2003-02-28). We still haven't
convinced all developers (in contrast to committers) to join the
redesign effort but we're making progress. In short, we suffer from
the problem of a huge user base and only a small set of active
developers and committers.
The good news is that the redesigned FOP does already handle the most
important things even if its progress is slow. We hope to make a
developer release 1.0 this year.
We have one big problem right now: We've realized that most of our
hyphenation pattern files must be removed from CVS because of
licences. The files were mostly adapted from Tex hyphenation
files. Some are GPL, some LPPL (not LGPL!) and some have something
else with occasional commercial-use restrictions. We're in the process
of resolving these issues. We may need help from higher up, I
guess. We'll get in touch
--- Forrest
In (just over) the last 3 months, Forrest has been rapidly
progressing, and has made its first three major releases ([1] [2]
[3]), using the new mirrors system. Progress has been evolutionary
rather than revolutionary, and backwards-compatibility has been
maintained across releases.
Community-wise, Forrest has gained a fair number of new users, and
many technically astute contributors on the mailing list. However,
core development has remained limited to a handful of people, and no
new committers have been nominated. Symbiosis with Cocoon remains
strong.
Bug reporting was moved to a JIRA install on Steven's box[4], which
also hosts Forrest's prototype continuous build tool, Forrestbot[5].
Licensing seems to all be in order. The few non-ASF jars in use all
have licenses in legal/, and all seem innocuous.
[1] 0.2: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-apache-announce&m=103746673310573&w=2
[2] 0.3: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-apache-announce&m=104399934113331&w=2
[3] 0.4: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-announce&m=104510734501302&w=2
[4] http://issues.cocoondev.org/jira/secure/Dashboard.jspa
[5] http://forrestbot.cocoondev.org/
--- Xalan-C ++
A second committer: Berin Lautenbach has joined David Bertoni to work
on Xalan-C++!
An interim build, built with Xerces 2.1 was released at the end of
October, 2002.
--- Xalan-J/XSLTC
Two new committers: Gordon Chiu and Ramesh Mandava have joined the team.
Active work is happening on 3 branches. Currently, the HEAD branch is
focused mainly on bug fixes. A developers release is planned for the
end of this week. The XSLTC_DTM branch is focused on the integration
of the DTM and serializers so Xalan-J and XSLTC can synchronize on a
more common code base. The XSLT20 branch is where the implementation
of the XSLT2.0 and XPath 2.0 drafts is continuing in earnest!
--- Xerces-C++
New committer: Gareth Reakes.
Xerces-C++ 2.2.0 was released at the early Feb, 2003.
--- Xerces-J
Things have been relatively quiet in Xerces-J land in the last three
months: in mid-November, we released version 2.2.1, which was
primarily a bugfix release; and in late January, we released
2.3.0. The latter release is noteworthy because it marks the
stabilization of the Xerces Native Interface.
--- Xerces-P
--- Xindice
Xindice is slowly warming up again after a period of little
activity. We are now getting closer to a release of version 1.1, with
a beta due in the next few days. More important, however, the
committers are ready to face the challenge of moving to version 2.0,
with possibly a different (more componentized) architecture and a
change in the internal database system. The last three months were
spent in finishing up the XML-RPC layer and the embedded driver,
squashing some annoying bugs with XUpdate, moving the documentation to
Forrest and getting ready to have a 1.1 release with a couple of
significant improvements over 1.0: UTF-8 compliance and drop of CORBA
in favor of XML-RPC. I think no new committers were voted in in this
period.
--- XML-Security
XML Security has been ping-ponged between WS and XML. We expect XML
Security to return to XML after the 2/19/2003 Board meeting
In response to the issues raised by this report:
Roy indicated that license by ref is not acceptable with the current license.
Dirk will capture a list of licenses approved to be committed to the foundation's web site, Dirk will determine the mechanism for providing input. Roy will create a mailing list for the everyone (both inside and outside) the ASF to participate in licensing discussions. Brian suggests waiting until the 2.0 license is published. Brian volunteered to apply fixes to the the set of known outstanding issues within the next week.
Roy will draft a resolution to move security back to xml from ws.
Dirk is concerned about AxKit not using the same ASF infrastructure and not interacting with other ASF projects. Greg took an action to talk to the XML PMC.
* what code releases have been made? [since the last report] Axis 1.0, 1.0rc2 Xerces-J 2.2.1, 2.2.0 Xalan-J 2.4.1 Xalan-C 1.4 xml-commons-resolver 1.0 Forrest 0.2rc1 * any legal issues to bring to the board? none * any cross-project issues that need to be addressed? The whole ASF reorg will definitely have an impact on xml.apache.org. * any problems with committers, members, etc? none * plans and expectations for the next period? A reorganization of xml.apache.org seems likely. * etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!) After the members meeting at ApacheCon, I think that xml is going to change quite a bit. I was away travelling for 5 weeks, and it's taken me a while to catchup with what's been happening in reorg@ and community@.
* what code releases have been made? [since 8/1/2002] Axis 1.0RC1 Batik 1.5beta4 XML Security 1.06D2 Xalan-J 2.40 Xerces-C 2.1.0 Xereces-J 2.1.0 * any legal issues to bring to the board? none * any cross-project issues that need to be addressed? The xml.apache.org website is in need of major improvement. * any problems with committers, members, etc? none that I am aware of * plans and expectations for the next period? I hope that ApacheCon will provide a venue for many xml.apache.org people to get together in person. * etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!)
Dirk reported that he had been thinking about the notion of a genesis or incubator PMC, as discussed at the members meeting, and was wondering how we are going to manage the reporting of projects to the ASF board. Roy suggested that one or two could be invited to each board meeting, and that a special status file for each project should be kept in the foundation repository.
Randy had to leave the teleconference at this point (12:01pm PDT).
The following resolution was approved by unanimous vote of the
directors present (Brian, Ken, Roy, Ben, Rasmus, Doug, Dirk).
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately
below be and hereby are appointed to serve as members of the Apache
XML Project Management Committee, effective immediately.
Scott Boag Tim Bray James Duncan Davidson
Mike Dierken Pier Paolo Fumagalli Ted Leung
Stefano Mazzocchi Mike Pogue James Tauber
Keith Visco Dirk-Willem van Gulik
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the board reiterates its appointment
of Dirk-Willem van Gulik as V.P., Apache XML, and chairman of the
Apache XML Project Management Committee.