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Tuesday Jun 18, 2013

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache™ Subversion® 1.8.0

Leading enterprise-grade Open Source version control system introduces numerous enhancements and features that simplify administration and further automate functionality

18 June 2013 --Forest Hill, MD-- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache Subversion 1.8.0.

Considered the most popular and widely-used Open Source version control system [1], Subversion was established in 2000 and submitted to the Apache Incubator in 2009. Since graduating as an Apache Top-Level Project in 2010, the Subversion community has continued to focus on meeting the diverse needs of both Open Source developers and worldwide enterprise environments with large data sets and complex branch topologies.

"Version control is a fundamental element of best practices for software development," said Apache Subversion Vice President Greg Stein. "Subversion has experienced tremendous success, becoming the go-to solution for stable, reliable version control for countless development teams.  Version 1.8.0 reinforces our commitment to delivering enterprise-ready functionality with an entry-level learning curve."

"Apache Subversion helps us build tailor-made software for enterprises all around the world," said Damir Deželjin, IT Solutions Architect at ComTrade. "Using a stable, secure, mature, maintainable source control system is of the utmost importance in building upon our 20-year history of successfully delivering projects of all different sizes. We are happy to confirm that our choice to adopt Subversion as a core source control system was the right decision."

Under the Hood
Apache Subversion 1.8.0 builds and expands upon the feature provisions of earlier releases to address many of the most commonly requested enhancements.

Since their introduction in prior releases, Subversion’s merge tracking and tree conflict detection features have been critical to its ability to serve projects where branching and merging happens often. The 1.8.0 version improves these features, further automating the client-side merge functionality and improving both tree conflict detection during merge operations and tree conflict resolution during update operations. Additionally, the Subversion client now tracks moves of working copy items as first-class operations, which brings immediate benefit to users today and is a key step toward more thorough system-wide support for moved and renamed objects in a future release.

The release brings improvements which benefit administrators as well.  One of the most common requests made by Subversion administrators has been for a unified mechanism by which to govern client-side configuration settings such as ignore patterns and automatic property definitions.  Subversion 1.8.0 delivers a clean answer to this request via newly introduced support for inheritable configuration-related properties which are stored in the repository itself.

"ADVA Optical Networking's 800+ software engineers collaborate from 10 locations worldwide to deliver innovative networking solutions, and Subversion is an important part of those collaboration activities," said Sridhar Machina, Manager of R&D Source Control. "We are very excited about the 1.8.0 release, and are specifically interested in the administration simplifications promised by the new repository-dictated configuration feature."

Subversion developers also targeted the flat-file repository storage backend (known as "FSFS") for a series of improvements in this release which include revision property caching, revision property file packing, and deltified storage of properties and directory entries lists.  While most of these enhancements aren’t user-visible, administrators will appreciate the increased performance and reduced disk usage they deliver.

"WordPress.org hosts tens of thousands of Subversion repositories that are used and abused in every way imaginable," explained WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. "I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the new storage efficiency saves us space so we can serve our community better."

In addition to new functionality, Subversion 1.8.0 completes the migration away from a dependency on the Neon HTTP library.  The client will now accomplish its HTTP-based network communications solely with the newer Serf library, which provides pipelined and cacheable access to the server, thereby improving performance.

Also, in light of the enhancements made for the newer FSFS repository storage backend and those already planned for future releases, the project has officially deprecated the original BerkeleyDB-based storage backend. The BerkeleyDB storage option will continue to be available and supported, but development efforts going forward will be focused on the FSFS backend.

"We are serious about addressing some long-term and nontrivial feature requests, and in order to do that we need to focus our efforts on a single storage backend," explained C. Michael Pilato, member of the Apache Subversion Project Management Committee. "Moving forward with the backend that is easiest to use and maintain and which is already nearly universally deployed makes sense."

Commitment to Progress
The Subversion 1.8.0 release is the culmination of many months of coding effort, but the design and development effort which resulted in this new version shows no sign of slowing in its wake. The release closely follows a recently held hackathon-style gathering of Subversion developers in Berlin, where participants celebrated the accomplishment and addressed future enhancements and releases. The driving force behind those discussions was the same as when the project was first founded: delivering reliable version control features that address tangible user requirements.

"Apache Subversion has continued to stay relevant and incredibly useful due to our commitment to working with our large community of users, understanding their requirements, and enhancing Subversion to meet those needs. That connection to our community is how we keep our broad base of Subversion users happy," added Stein.

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Subversion software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Subversion release notes, source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://subversion.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Apache Subversion", "Subversion", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

[1] http://www.ohloh.net/repositories/compare

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Posted at 12:00PM Jun 18, 2013 by Sally in General  |  Comments[2]  | 

Tuesday Jun 11, 2013

The Apache Software Foundation Welcomes New Members

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) held its annual Members' meeting this May. Among the Foundation's business that takes place during this meeting is the election of new ASF Members.

At its inception in 1999, The ASF comprised 21 individuals who oversaw the progress of the Apache HTTP Server. This group formed the Foundation's core membership.

This group grew with "Committers", developers who contributed code, patches, or documentation, and were subsequently granted access by the Membership:

  1) to "commit" or "write" (contribute) directly to the code repository;

  2) the right to vote on community-related decisions; and

  3) and the ability propose an active user for Committership

Those Committers who demonstrate merit in the Foundation’s growth, evolution, and progress are nominated for ASF Membership by existing members. There are currently 468 active Apache Members.

ASF Members are elected bi-annually. New Members elected at the May 2013 Members' meeting are:

Alejandro Abdelnur, Robin Anil, Andrew Bayer, Sergey Beryozkin, Alan M. Carroll, Pei Chen, Chip Childers, Fabian Christ, Luca Cinquini, Dave Cottlehuber, Martin Desruisseaux, Andrew Farris, Adam Fuchs, Reto Bachmann-Gmuer, Daniel Gruno, Alex Harui, Dan Haywood, Sheryl John, Konstantin Kolinko, Christine Koppelt, Jörn Kottmann, Matt Massie, Christian Mueller, David Nalley, Thomas Neidhart, Robert Newson, Ricky Nguyen, Andrea Pescetti, Mark Phippard, Marlon Pierce, Andrew Rist, Henry Saputra, Vinod Kumar Vavilapalli, Andreas Veithen, Nick Wellnhofer, Paul Zimdars.

Welcome all!

The complete list of ASF Members and Committers is available at https://people.apache.org/committers-by-project.html#member. For more information on how the ASF works, visit http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html.

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Posted at 08:08AM Jun 11, 2013 by Sally in General  |  Comments[3]  | 

Tuesday Apr 09, 2013

The Apache Software Foundation Community Development Project Welcomes Student Proposals for Google Summer of Code 2013

Hundreds of students mentored in "The Apache Way" of Open Source community leadership

Forest Hill, MD –9 April 2013– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)'s Community Development (ComDev) project today announced its acceptance into the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization for the eighth consecutive year.

The ComDev team helps newcomers learn about the ASF's projects, governance, and activities, and guides them in becoming part of the meritocratic, all-volunteer Apache community.

Established in 2005, the Google Summer of Code offers student developers from around the world stipends to write code for various Open Source software projects over a three month period.

The ASF has actively participated in GSoC since the program's inception, mentoring 30-45 students each year, and providing exposure to real-world software and community development "The Apache Way".

Countless GSoC students mentored by the Apache community continue to be long-term code committers on a variety of Apache projects. Some active program participants have even been elected as members of the ASF.
This year, dozens of Apache projects have committed to mentoring GSoC students. They include, but are not limited to, Accumulo, Airavata, Axiom, Bloodhound, CloudStack, CouchDB, Crunch, Giraph, Gora, Hama, Hive, Isis, Jena, Lenya, Lucene, Mahout, ManifoldCF, Mesos, Nutch, ODE, OpenMeetings, OpenOffice, Pig, Rat, SIS, Sling, Solr, Stanbol, Tika, VXQuery, Wookie, XalanJ, and XercesJ. 

The ComDev team recommends GSoC students to discuss ideas directly with all Apache project(s) of interest before the official start of the application phase on Monday, 22 April 2013. The ASF's more than 100 Top-Level Projects and nearly three dozen initiatives in the Apache Incubator are listed at  http://www.apache.org/ and http://incubator.apache.org/ respectively.

For more information on Apache Community Development and to get involved with Apache projects for GSoC, visit http://community.apache.org/gsoc.html

Details on the Google Summer of Code is available at http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Accumulo", "Apache Accumulo", "Airavata", "Apache Airavata", "Axiom", "Apache Axiom", "Bloodhound", "Apache Bloodhound", "CloudStack", "Apache CloudStack", "CouchDB", "Apache CouchDB", "Crunch", "Apache Crunch", "Giraph", "Apache Giraph", "Gora", "Apache Gora", "Hama", "Apache Hama", "Hive", "Apache Hive", "Isis", "Apache Isis", "Jena", "Apache Jena", "Lenya", "Apache Lenya", "Lucene", "Apache Lucene", "Mahout", "Apache Mahout", "ManifoldCF", "Apache ManifoldCF", "Mesos", "Apache Mesos", "Nutch", "Apache Nutch", "ODE", "Apache ODE", "OpenMeetings", "Apache OpenMeetings", "OpenOffice", "Apache OpenOffice", "Pig", "Apache Pig", "Rat", "Apache Rat", "SIS", "Apache SIS", "Sling", "Apache Sling", "Solr", "Apache Solr", "Stanbol", "Apache Stanbol", "Tika", "Apache Tika", "VXQuery", "Apache VXQuery",  "Wookie", "Apache Wookie", "XalanJ", "Apache XalanJ", "XercesJ", "Apache XercesJ",  and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
press@apache.org
+1 617 921 8656

Posted at 04:00PM Apr 09, 2013 by Sally in General  |  Comments[1]  | 

MEDIA ALERT: The Apache Struts Project Announces Apache Struts™ 1 End-Of-Life

Apache Struts 2 recommended as an elegant Open Source, extensible successor framework for creating enterprise-ready Java Web applications

Forest Hill, MD –9 April 2013–

WHO: The Apache Software Foundation's Apache Struts Project, creators of leading Open Source solutions for creating Java web applications.

WHAT: The Struts™ 1.x Web framework has reached its end-of-life (EOL) and is no longer officially supported.

Created in 2000 to provide an improved development experience over pure Java Server Pages (JSP) utilization, Apache Struts 1 soon became the de-facto standard for Java-based Web application development. Numerous companies world-wide adopted Struts 1 as a strategic platform, even after JSF (Java Server Faces) was introduced as a standardized Java EE framework for Web application development. Its popularity was so prevalent in the early 2000s, most job offerings in the space of Java-based Web technology required Struts 1 as a must-have skill. 

Today, many important Websites and Web-based user interfaces continue to rely on Struts 1 technology. In addition, many popular Web frameworks, such as Spring MVC and WebWork, were significantly inspired by Struts 1.

WHEN: The Apache Struts Project Management Committee is not aware of any urgent issues posing the immediate need to eliminate Struts 1 usage. However, the project's EOL status signifies that security and bug fixes will no longer be provided effective immediately.

The Apache Struts project recommends new projects to be developed using Struts 2 as opposed to Struts 1. While any action-based Java web framework is a potential candidate to re-use Struts 1 architectural experience or migrate existing Struts-1-based applications, users are highly advised to investigate Struts 2 as a successor framework.

WHY: Struts 2 is modern, highly decoupled, feature rich, well maintained, and successfully running in many mission-critical projects globally. It shares the same basic principles with Struts 1, and offers a highly improved architecture, API, and solution portfolio.

WHERE: The last release of Apache Struts 1 is version 1.3.10 from December 2008. All software downloads, notices, and updates are available at the Apache Struts project homepage at http://struts.apache.org/.

NEXT STEPS: The Struts community continues its focus on pushing the Apache Struts 2 framework forward, with as many as 23 releases to date. 

Availability and Oversight
Apache Struts software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Struts source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://struts.apache.org/. 

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Struts", "Apache Struts", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
press@apache.org
+1 617 921 8656

Posted at 01:01PM Apr 09, 2013 by Sally in General  |   | 

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache cTAKES™ as a Top-Level Project

Open Source natural language processing (NLP) tool for information extraction from electronic medical record clinical free-text

Forest Hill, MD –9 April 2013– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache cTAKES has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System) is an Open Source natural language processing system for information extraction from electronic medical record clinical free-text. Widely used in production by numerous organizations across the healthcare sector, cTAKES was started in 2006 by a team of physicians, computer scientists and software engineers at Mayo Clinic, and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in June 2012. 

Apache cTAKES was built using the Apache UIMA framework and the Apache OpenNLP natural language processing toolkit. Its components are specifically trained for the clinical domain out of diverse manually annotated datasets, and create rich linguistic and semantic annotations that can be utilized by clinical decision support systems and clinical research. 

"As a well-developed NLP tool with a mature codebase, cTAKES is the cornerstone of a variety of use cases in the domain of biomedicine such as phenotype discovery, translational science, pharmacogenomics and pharmacogenetics," said Pei Chen, Vice President of Apache cTAKES. "We are pleased to have proven our adoption of the 'Apache Way', and welcome additional contributors to our growing community."

Availability and Oversight
Apache cTAKES software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache cTAKES source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://ctakes.apache.org/. 

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "cTAKES", "Apache cTAKES", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
press@apache.org
+1 617 921 8656

Posted at 12:00PM Apr 09, 2013 by Sally in General  |   | 

Tuesday Apr 02, 2013

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Bloodhound™ as a Top-Level Project

Open Source Development Collaboration Tool Provides Intuitive Management of Software Projects and Issue Tracking for Global Organizations of All Sizes

Forest Hill, MD –2 April 2013– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Bloodhound has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Bloodhound is a world-class software development collaboration tool, including issue tracking, wiki and repository browsing based on Trac, the Open Source, Web-based project management and bug tracking system.

"When Bloodhound entered the incubator it was a completely new project, though being built on top of the Trac framework has given it a strong foundation" said Gary Martin, Vice President of Apache Bloodhound. "Community growth and self-governing to the standards of a top-level project within The Apache Foundation has given the team invaluable experience."

While Trac is already widely used in production by many organizations, Bloodhound resolves requests that have remained unaddressed, including the support for hosting multiple projects, full-text search and an intuitive user interface. In addition, Bloodhound’s tightly-integrated source code browser works with Apache Subversion and Git, provides Wiki functionality, and is compatible with hundreds of free plugins for Trac, allowing users to customize their experience even further.

Bloodhound is especially relevant to organizations that need to avoid storing data in proprietary systems, which puts their information at risk of vendor lock-in. Its user-friendly, responsive interface caters for screen sizes –from mobile phones to desktop computers– further demonstrates its support for modern lifestyles.

Global software provider WANdisco submitted Bloodhound to the Apache Incubator in December 2011. The Apache Foundation was seen as the natural choice for its commitment to "Community over Code" which was the approach the initial contributors wanted to take.

"Becoming a TLP is fantastic recognition of the progress Bloodhound has made so far in adopting the 'Apache Way' but we do not plan to rest on our laurels." said Martin. "We actively welcome potential contributors and continue to look at ways of reducing barriers to contribution."

Availability and Oversight
Apache Bloodhound software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Bloodhound source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://bloodhound.apache.org/. 
Project updates and online demo instances are available for the latest stable released version, as well as a nightly build that shows the latest progress in the project. For more information, follow the nightly build at https://bh-demo1.apache.org/, the latest stable release at https://bh-demo2.apache.org/, and the Apache Bloodhound Twitter feed @apbloodhound.

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Bloodhound", "Apache Bloodhound", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
press@apache.org
+1 617 921 8656

Posted at 12:00PM Apr 02, 2013 by Sally in General  |  Comments[1]  | 

Monday Mar 25, 2013

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache CloudStack™ as a Top-Level Project

Mature, Open Source turn-key platform widely used for delivering scalable, full-featured Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

Forest Hill, MD –25 March 2013– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache CloudStack has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles. 

"When CloudStack first became an Apache Incubator project, it was a well-established cloud management platform with a mature codebase," said Chip Childers, Vice President of Apache CloudStack. "Our work in the Incubator has focused on growing a really strong community around the code and establishing the governance practices expected of a top-level project within The Apache Software Foundation."

Widely used in production by many organizations, CloudStack is formerly the product of Cloud.com, which was acquired by Citrix in 2011, and was submitted to the Apache Incubator by Citrix in April 2012. 

Apache CloudStack is a complete software suite for creating Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing in private-, public-, and hybrid cloud environments. It has been proven to be both stable and highly scalable, underpinning production clouds with more than 30,000 physical nodes, in geo-distributed environments.

"Becoming a TLP is an important step in the project's evolution and growth," added Childers. "CloudStack had the advantage of having many long-term, large deployments which had proven the stability and scalability of the technology. This helped us concentrate on adopting the 'Apache Way' of governance, which is well understood and open, delivering so many great pieces of software over the years."

CloudStack's target environments include service providers and enterprises; it is used by many service providers to set up an on-demand, elastic cloud computing services and by enterprises to set up a private cloud for use by their own employees. Apache CloudStack is also available to individuals and organizations that wish to study and implement an IaaS for personal, educational, and/or production use.

"We believe that Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the next generation of IT infrastructure, and that people will demand open standards and open governance for such an important layer in their IT stack," explained Childers. That is why having the CloudStack project meet the rigorous standards of ASF governance is so significant."

Underscoring the ASF's edict of "Community over Code", Childers said: "we've managed to build a diverse, friendly and very open community around CloudStack. New participants receive a really warm welcome and we make sure that all contributors are on an equal footing, whether they are writing code or helping with any other aspect of the project. Anybody thinking of getting involved in the project would quickly find what a great community we are. In addition to online involvement, we've already had a global collaboration conference and there are many CloudStack groups established in many different countries."

Availability and Oversight
Apache CloudStack software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache CloudStack source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://cloudstack.apache.org/.

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "CloudStack", "Apache CloudStack", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

#  #  #

Contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
press@apache.org
+1 617 921 8656

Posted at 02:00PM Mar 25, 2013 by Sally in General  |   | 

Monday Jan 14, 2013

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Flex™ as a Top-Level Project

Open Source, cross-platform application framework for easily building and maintaining Flash®-based applications across all major browsers, desktops and devices, including smartphones, tablets and television.

Forest Hill, MD –-14 January 2013-– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Flex has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

"Being a TLP demonstrates Apache Flex's commitment to 'The Apache Way' and the project's ability to self-govern, and be a part of the broader ASF community,” said Alex Harui, Vice President of Apache Flex.

Formerly Adobe Flex, the project originated at Macromedia prior to its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc. (ADBE), and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in 2011.

Flex is an Open Source software development kit (SDK) for the building and deploying cross-platform rich Internet applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. The Flex framework allows expressive Web applications to deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops and devices (including smartphones, tablets and TV). In addition, Apache Flex provides a modern, standards-based language and programming model that supports common design patterns suitable for developers from many backgrounds. Flex applications can be deployed to the ubiquitous Adobe® Flash® Player in the browser, Adobe® AIR™ on desktop and mobile or to native Android™, iOS™, QNX®, Windows® or Mac® applications.

Announcing Apache Flex v4.9

The Project also announced the availability of version 4.9 of the Apache Flex application framework. Apache Flex 4.9 and the Apache Flex SDK Installer 2.0 consist of a software development kit (SDK), a compiler, and automated testing tools.

"The Apache Flex SDK Installer increases software developer productivity by reducing the amount of time spent configuring utilities and components needed to make the SDK work with an IDE," said OmPrakash Muppirala, release manager for the Apache Flex SDK Installer.

The Apache Flex 4.9 SDK allows application developers to build expressive web and mobile applications using MXML for layout and ActionScript 3, an ECMAScript based language for client-side scripting.

The v4.9 release contains several important bug fixes, including improved internationalization support (including new locales), added support and enhancements. Highlights include:

  • New localizations for Australian, British, Canadian, Greek, Switzerland (German) and Portuguese
  • The SDK can be compiled to work with Flash Player versions 10.2 through 11.5
  • Better support for Vectors, including new VectorList and VectorCollection classes
  • Inclusion of the new PostalCodeFormatter and PostalCodeValidator components for more consistent internationalization was made
  • The TLF (Text Layout Framework) was updated to version 3.0.33, and is now included in the SDK (there is no additional step required to download it separately)
  • Support for Java 7 for compiling the SDK
  • Many bug fixes, and other enhancements were included


Many volunteers dedicated to the framework and the wider Flex community made contributions to both the SDK and the Installer.

"We are excited to continue working to develop the Apache Flex Software Development Kit, Installer, Mustella Testing Framework, and 'Falcon' Compiler to allow people to build better applications with better developer productivity," explained Harui.

For more information, see the release notes at http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/flex/4.9.0/RELEASE_NOTES.

"Code has been donated but our work isn’t complete to include better support for Maven and better parity between mx and spark components," Harui added. "The work on next release of Apache Flex is already underway. Stay tuned!"

Catch Apache Flex in action at ApacheCon 24 February-2 March 2013 and gain hands-on knowledge on how to use and create real world applications as presented by Apache Flex 4.9 SDK release manager Justin Mclean. For more information and to register, visit http://na.apachecon.com/.

Availability and Oversight

Apache Flex software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Flex source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://flex.apache.org/.

About the Apache Incubator

The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware,  WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Flex", "Apache Flex", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Posted at 11:00AM Jan 14, 2013 by Sally in General  |  Comments[1]  | 

Wednesday Jan 02, 2013

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Cassandra™ v1.2

High-performance, super-robust Big Data distributed database introduces support for dense clusters, simplifies application modeling, and improves data cell storage, design, and representation.

Forest Hill, MD –2 January 2013– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache Cassandra v1.2, the latest version of the highly-scalable, fault-tolerant, Big Data distributed database.

Successfully handling thousands of requests per second, Apache Cassandra powers massive data sets quickly and reliably without compromising performance –whether running in the Cloud or partially on-premise in a hybrid data store. Apache Cassandra is successfully used by an array of organizations that include Adobe, Appscale, Appssavvy, Backupify, Cisco, Clearspring, Cloudtalk, Constant Contact, DataStax, Digg, Digital River, Disney, eBay, Easou, Formspring, Hailo, Hobsons, IBM, Mahalo.com, Morningstar, Netflix, Openwave, OpenX, Palantir, PBS, Plaxo, Rackspace, Reddit, RockYou, Shazam, SimpleGeo, Spotify, Thomson-Reuters, Twitter, Urban Airship, US Government, Walmart Labs, Williams-Sonoma, Inc., and Yakaz.

"We are pleased to announce Cassandra 1.2," said Jonathan Ellis, Vice President of Apache Cassandra. "By improving support for dense clusters —powering multiple terabytes per node— as well as simplifying application modeling, and improving data cell storage/design/representation, systems are able to effortlessly scale petabytes of data."

Highlights for the second generation high-performance, NoSQL database includes clustering across virtual nodes, inter-node communication, atomic batches, and request tracing. In addition, Cassandra v1.2 also marks the release of CQL3 (version 3 of the Cassandra Query Language), to simplify application modeling, allow for more powerful mapping, and alleviate design limitations through more natural representation.

"We are really excited to begin taking advantage of all the new features Apache Cassandra v1.2 has to offer – particularly virtual nodes and atomic batches. Both of these new features will play a central role in future enhancements to our architecture," said Ed Anuff, VP, Mobile Platform at Apigee.

"It's great to see the core of Apache Cassandra continue to evolve," said independent software developer Kelly Sommers. "In Cassandra v1.2 the introduction of vnodes will simplify managing clusters while improving performance when adding and rebuilding nodes. v1.2 also includes many new features, performance improvements and further heap reduction to eleviate the burden on the JVM garbage collector."

"The much anticipated release of Cassandra 1.2 brings with it features that simplify application development. Atomic batches provide a mechanism for developers to ensure transactional integrity across a business process, instead of relying on idempotent operations and retry mechanisms," said Brian O’Neill, Lead Architect at Health Market Science. "Additionally, native support for collections is attractive and a compelling reason to explore CQL 3."

"Apache Cassandra continues to be a leading option for scalability and high availability without compromising performance and, with the improvements provided in v1.2, reinforces our commitment to growth while preserving backwards compatibility," added Ellis.

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Cassandra v1.2 is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project’s day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Cassandra source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://cassandra.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world’s most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Cassandra", "Apache Cassandra", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
pressATapacheDOTorg
+1 617 921 8656

Posted at 03:00PM Jan 02, 2013 by Sally in General  |   | 

Wednesday Dec 12, 2012

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Program for 25th ApacheCon

"Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation" showcases dozens of key Apache projects across Big Data, Cloud Computing, Infrastructure, Messaging, Scientific Applications, and more.

Forest Hill, MD – 12 December 2012 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced the program and early registration incentives for ApacheCon North America 2013, the 25th edition of the ASF's official conference, trainings, and expo.

Taking place 24 February-2 March 2013 at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower in Portland, Oregon, ApacheCon is the ideal opportunity for those developing Apache-based solutions, as well as those interested in committing code to an Apache project, contributing to the Apache Incubator, or enhancing their Open Source products and community practices. ApacheCon offers an excellent way to meet the individual contributors behind some of the industry's most popular Apache projects through hands-on educational sessions and ample networking opportunities.

This year's theme is "Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation", reflecting the enormous reach and influence of the ASF. Apache products power half the Internet, petabytes of data, teraflops of operations, billions of objects, and enhance the lives of countless users and developers. First held in 1998 for developers and users of the Apache Server to meet face-to-face, ApacheCon is the public showcase for Apache innovations, from the ubiquitous flagship Apache HTTP Server to industry-defining solutions in Cloud Computing, Big Data, and Infrastructure, to dozens of emerging projects in the Apache Incubator and Labs.

The event will kick off with two days of pre-conference trainings, BarCamp, and Hackathon activities, followed by the main conference + expo 26-28 February, and will close with post-conference sprints, workshops, and team building events.

Content by the Community, for the Community

The ApacheCon program was carefully reviewed and selected by Apache Members and Committers, and celebrates the diversity of the many projects under the Apache banner. Track/session/speaker highlights include:

Overture and Beginners
- Should you bring your project to the Incubator? - Benson Margulies
- Getting to Know Apache CloudStack - Joe Brockmeier
- Getting Hadoop, Hive and HBase up and running in less than 15 minutes - Mark Grover

A Patchy Web
- What's new in httpd 2.4 - Rich Bowen
- Tomcat 8 update - Mark Thomas
- Introducing Apache Traffic Server - Igor Galić

Community Over Code
- Managing Open Source Community Brands - Shane Curcuru
- Open Development in the Enterprise - Bertrand Delacretaz
- Human Resource Management in Open Source Communities - Daniel Gruno

Tapping the Stream
- Instant integration into the AMQP cloud with Apache Qpid Messenger - Rafael Schloming
- Apache Streams: Enterprise Social Integration - Matt Franklin
- Next Generation Open Source Messaging with Apollo - Hiram Chirino

Cloud Crowd
- Creating Pools of Virtual Machines (10s or 100s) - Andrei Savu
- Apache CloudStack's Plugin Model: Balancing the Cathedral with a Bazaar - Don Lafferty
- Hadoop and HBase on the Cloud: A Case Study on Performance and Isolation. - Konstantin Shvachko

Apache in Science
- Case Study: Apache OODT Framework Application for Support to the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) - Richard Ullman
- Apache Airavata: Building Gateways to innovation - Suresh Marru
- Searching for cancer biomarkers with Apache OODT - Rishi Verma

Open Office
- Apache OpenOffice: Project Update and Future Direction - Donald Harbison
- Scripting Apache OpenOffice - Rony G. Flatscher
- OpenOffice: from Bureaucracy to Meritocracy - Kay Schenk

Bigger Big Data
- Firefox Crash Analysis - Laura Thomson
- Solr Query Parsing - Erik Hatcher
- Mastering Sqoop for Data Transfer for Big Data - Kathleen Ting
- Best Practices for CouchDB Developers on Windows Azure - Brian Benz

How Secure?
- Introduction to Apache Shiro - Les Hazlewood
- Reining in Security Sprawl: Certificate & Key Management for Big Data - Dustin Kirkland

Cassandra
- The new face of Cassandra - Michaël Figuière
- Cassandra in Action - Jonathan Ellis
- Virtual Nodes: Rethinking Topology in Cassandra - Eric Evans

Caravan
- Integrating WebServices with Camel - Daniel Kulp
- Performance optimizations for Apache Camel - Christian Müller
- NoSQL takes over – Systems Integration in the NoSQL Era with Apache Camel - Kai Wähner

In addition, popular ApacheCon sessions return, including "State of the Feather" by ASF President and conference chairman Jim Jagielski, "The Apache Way" by Nick Burch, "The Business of Open Source" panel by Sally Khudairi, and the Fast Feather Track's introductions to select projects in the Apache Incubator and Labs.

ApacheCon is for Everyone!

ApacheCon draws Open Source users, developers, gurus, students, novices, community managers, and enthusiasts to address today's issues, opportunities, and solutions focusing on the ASF's many diverse projects and initiatives. Anyone interested in Apache products is welcome: ASF affiliation is not required to present at, attend, or otherwise participate in ApacheCon.

Registration Information

Early registration incentives include savings of up to $300 when registering by 31 December 2012 as well as special rates for students and Apache Committers. To register, visit http://na.apachecon.com/ .

Discounted sleeping room rates have been secured for ApacheCon attendees at the conference hotel until 28 January 2013. Requests made after the cutoff date or after the room block is sold out (whichever comes first) will be fulfilled based on availability at the prevailing rate of the hotel. Participants are encouraged to register early at http://na.apachecon.com/venue/ .

Sponsors, Exhibitors, and Partners

ApacheCon Sponsors include AppDynamics, IBM, HP, RedHat, and VMWare, and are joined by SourceForge, official event Media Partners. For sponsor, exhibitor, and community partnership opportunities, contact Nancy Asche <acnasponsorsATtheopenbastionDOTcom>.

Conference registration is complimentary for members of the press and analyst community with valid credentials. For media partnerships and registration, contact Corinna Rogers at <corinnaATstaedelcommsDOTcom> or on +1 404 941 4234 for more information.

Stay Informed + Get Involved!

To register or make a donation, visit http://na.apachecon.com/. To volunteer, connect with participants, or contribute to the "local guide" wiki, visit http://wiki.apache.org/apachecon/

Keep up with the latest developments and program updates by subscribing to announce@apachecon.com, following the @ApacheCon feed on Twitter, and tracking on Lanyrd at http://lanyrd.com/2013/apachecon/ .

ApacheCon is produced by The Open Bastion in partnership with The Apache Software Foundation.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "ActiveMQ Apollo", "Apache ActiveMQ Apollo", "Airavata", "Apache Airavata", "Camel", "Apache Camel", "Cassandra", "Apache Cassandra", "CloudStack”, "Apache CloudStack”, "Cordova", "Apache Cordova", "Flex", "Apache Flex", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "HBase", "Apache HBase", "Hive", "Apache Hive", "Apache HTTP Server", "OODT", "Apache OODT", "OpenOffice", "Apache OpenOffice", "Qpid", "Apache Qpid", "Shiro", "Apache Shiro", "Solr", "Apache Solr", "Streams", "Apache Streams", "Tomcat", "Apache Tomcat", "Traffic Server", "Apache Traffic Server", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Posted at 01:00PM Dec 12, 2012 by Sally in General  |  Comments[4]  | 

Tuesday Oct 30, 2012

The Apache Software Foundation Announces ApacheCon Europe Community Edition Officially Sold-Out; Extends CFP for North America Event

Premier Open Source event brings developers and users together to lead communities "The Apache Way", and accelerate success in evaluating, building, adopting, and deploying solutions across the Apache ecosystem.

Forest Hill, MD –30 October 2012– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) today announced key milestones and updates for ApacheCon, its official conference series.

Now in its 13th year, ApacheCon brings users, developers, gurus, students, novices, and enthusiasts together to explore key issues in evaluating, building, and adopting Open Source innovations "The Apache Way". ApacheCon is an ideal opportunity for technologists currently developing Apache-based solutions, as well as those interested in committing code to an Apache project, contributing to the Apache Incubator, or enhancing their Open Source products and community practices. In alignment with the community-driven culture of the ASF, all content for ApacheCon is selected by members of Apache Project Management Committees.

More than 500 delegates will convene at ApacheCon Europe 5-8 November 2012 at the Rhein-Neckar-Arena in Sinsheim, Germany. The sold-out event marks the introduction of the "Community Edition" of ApacheCon --a smaller, less formal event aimed at a more technically-oriented audience, and featuring nearly 140 presentations across 6 tracks, MeetUps, FastFeather and Community Tracks, Hackathon, and BarCamp. The complete schedule is available at http://www.apachecon.eu/schedule/

ApacheCon Europe is underwritten through a generous donation by Platinum Sponsor SAP; Claus von Riegen, Head of Open Source and Open Standards participation, will serve as the conference’s opening plenary speaker. Joining SAP are Gold Sponsors Citrix (co-sponsors of the Cloud Track and sponsors of the event’s wireless connectivity), Google (sponsors of special student registration subsidies), Hortonworks (exclusive sponsors of the Big Data Track), and LucidWorks (exclusive sponsors of the Lucene/Solr & Friends Track and LuceneEurocon, which is co-located with ApacheCon); and Silver Sponsors Cloudant (co-sponsors of the NoSQL Database Track), HP (co-sponsors of the Cloud Track), Optiver (co-sponsors of the NoSQL Database Track), and Oracle (sponsors of the Apache OpenOffice Track); and evening events sponsors Adobe, codeBusters, The Open Bastion, and VMware.

ApacheCon Europe Community Edition is organized and run by the Apache community with assistance from The Open Bastion, producers of ApacheCon North America 2013.

Scheduled to take place 24 February – 2 March 2013, ApacheCon North America will be held at the Portland Hilton in Portland, Oregon, United States. The event will kick off with pre-conference trainings, BarCamp, and hackathon the first two days; followed by the main conference + expo 26-28 February; and closing with post-conference sprints, workshops, and team building events.

The theme for ApacheCon North America is "Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation", showcasing the diverse applications and solutions made possible by Apache technologies. Submissions about novel uses of Apache products and how they are helping to shape the future are particularly welcome, including proposals on technical, business and community matters for audiences at all levels from beginner to expert, with particular focus on those demonstrating real-world experience of solving specific problems.

Dozens of Apache technologies—from Abdera to Zookeeper—will be represented across popular topic areas and tracks that include: Apache Daily (everyday tools, frameworks, and components), ApacheEE (Java Enterprise projects at the ASF), Big Data, Enterprise Messaging & Integration, Cloud, Linked Data, Lucene/Solr & Friends (Smart Search & Analytics), Modular Java, NoSQL Database,    OFBiz (Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning), Apache OpenOffice, Web Infrastructure, Business & Community, and many more. To submit a proposal for ApacheCon North America, visit http://na.apachecon.com/

Early-Bird registration will open with the announcement of the conference program at the end of November. Updates will be posted on the @ApacheCon Twitter feed and the ApacheCon Website.

For sponsor and exhibitor information, contact Nancy Asche at acnasponsors@theopenbastion.com or on +1 407 601 6228.

For press/analyst registration and credentialing, or to become a Media Partner, contact Sally Khudairi on +1 617 921 8656 or sk@apache.org.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world’s most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation’s official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Abdera", "Apache Abdera", "Zookeeper", "Apache Zookeeper" and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Posted at 12:00PM Oct 30, 2012 by Sally in General  |  Comments[4]  | 

Thursday Oct 18, 2012

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache OpenOffice™ as a Top-Level Project

Award-winning leading Open Source productivity suite widely used in 228 countries; over 20 million downloads of latest version since its release in May 2012

Forest Hill, MD – 18 October 2012 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Open Office has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

"The graduation of OpenOffice is testament to The Apache Way successfully scaling from incubating 'ingredient brands' to a highly-established end-user product," said ASF Executive Vice President and Apache OpenOffice mentor Ross Gardler. "The incubation process allowed experienced Apache contributors to mentor the project, helping both new and established OpenOffice contributors build an Apache-style community that is both open and diverse."

"The OpenOffice graduation is the official recognition that the project is now able to self-manage not only in technical matters, but also in community issues," said Andrea Pescetti, Vice President of Apache OpenOffice. "The 'Apache Way' and its methods, such as taking every decision in public with total transparency, have allowed the project to attract and successfully engage new volunteers, and to elect an active and diverse Project Management Committee that will be able to guarantee a stable future to Apache OpenOffice."

Initially created by Star Division in the 1990's, the OpenOffice code base was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 and later Oracle Corporation in 2010, before being submitted to The Apache Software Foundation Incubator in June 2011.

During its development period in the Apache Incubator, the Apache OpenOffice project transitioned nearly 10 million lines of code, added numerous enhancements, and fixed dozens of user-reported bugs in the popular and free productivity suite. In addition, the software received five industry awards, ranging from individual component highlights to top download to best Open Source desktop office productivity application suite.

In May 2012 Apache OpenOffice v3.4 was released in 20 languages, and downloaded over 20 million times by individual, corporate, educational, and government users in 228 countries. Since then, the project has been working on new functionality, innovations, and releases targeted for Q1 and Q4 2013.

"It's really cool that OpenOffice is now a top-level project at Apache," said Juergen Schmidt, Apache OpenOffice Release Manager. "We met many challenges to achieve this milestone: our first Apache OpenOffice 3.4 release required our community to not only transition the code from Oracle repositories to Apache, but also replace incompatibly-licensed libraries in order to successfully meet Apache's licensing requirements. Now our Apache OpenOffice source code is available for the benefit of other projects and organizations."

"We are extremely proud of this important milestone and welcome OpenOffice into our stable of world leading Apache projects," added Gardler.

Availability and Oversight
Apache OpenOffice is available free of charge to any user for any purpose, and may be downloaded from http://openoffice.org. The product can be downloaded on an unlimited number of PCs for an unlimited number of users --completely free of any license fees. The project has a strong focus on open standards support, from ODF (the first implementor of ISO/IEC 26300) to future plans for CMIS, OpenSocial, and OData.

As with all Apache software, Apache OpenOffice software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Information on Apache OpenOffice source code, documentation, mailing lists, related resources, and ways to participate are available at http://openoffice.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "OpenOffice", "Apache OpenOffice", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Posted at 11:00AM Oct 18, 2012 by Sally in General  |  Comments[10]  | 

Tuesday Oct 02, 2012

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Airavata as a Top-Level Project

NSF-seeded Open Source software framework used for executing and managing small to large-scale applications and workflows across local resources, computational grids, and the Cloud.

Forest Hill, MD –-2 October 2012-– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Airavata has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

"Being a TLP demonstrates Apache Airavata's commitment to 'The Apache Way' and the project's ability to self-govern, and be a part of the broader ASF community,"  said Chris Mattmann, Vice President of Apache OODT and member of the Apache Tika Project Management Committee. "We are excited to continue working to integrate Apache OODT and Airavata and to work together to leverage Apache Tika for data understanding, classification and extraction in both projects."

Designed to abstract out the complexities in accessing computational resources, Apache Airavata provides API's, sophisticated server-side tools, and graphical user interfaces to construct, execute, control and manage long running applications and workflows on distributed resources including local clusters, supercomputers, national grids, academic and commercial clouds.

"Airavata was initially developed by the National Science Foundation funded collaboration - Linked Environment for Atmospheric Discovery, for creating Cyberinfrastructure systems to enable faster-than-real-time severe weather forecasts" said Suresh Marru, Vice President of Apache Airavata. "Apache Airavata has evolved into a truly open and independent platform created to interface with emerging distributed computing paradigms including High Performance, High Throughput and On-Demand Computing."

The strategy of the Airavata framework is a minimalist architectural design - a conceptually simple to understand modular, componentized software - which is easy to install, maintain and use. This service oriented architecture helps Apache Airavata to blend into diverse software systems. Early adopters of Apache Airavata includes Science Gateways which integrate applications, workflows, data collections with computational resources like Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Additional users include ParamChem, the UltaScan Laboratory Information Management System, the Leadership Class Configuration Interaction Project, and the BioVLab Project.

"Sustainability of science gateways actually can have a very significant impact on science," said Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, co-director of the XSEDE Extended Support for Communities program, which includes gateways that interface to XSEDE resources. "This important leadership in the area of Open Source, community-developed code can be a model for many other scientific software projects. It's the sustainable projects with long-term viability."

Developed on open standards, Apache Airavata is collaboratively supported by individuals from diverse institutes, corporations and non-commercial organizations from around the world. Seeded by code donations from Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute, interest in Apache Airavata continues, and the Project welcomes new participants to its growing community.

"The Airavata project began life as part of the NSF-funded Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery project," explained Marlon Pierce, Principal Investigator on the NSF-funded Open Gateway Computing Environments project and Science Gateway Group Lead at Indiana University. "We worked hard through additional NSF funding of the Open Gateway Computing Environments project to generalize the workflow software to many science (and broader) domains. For us, The Apache Software Foundation represents an important open community model as well as Open Source model for diversely-developed, sustainable scientific software. We hope to convince more in our community to follow suit."

Shahani Markus Weerawarana, Visiting Lecturer at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, added, "With its graduation as a TLP, Apache Airavata is trailblazing a path in science gateways research and development by embracing the 'Apache Way' and thereby ensuring wide international participation of software engineers, scientists, researchers and students." 

Since entering the Apache Incubator in May 2011, the Apache Airavata project has successfully produced several code releases in preparation of its first production-ready, v1.0 release.

Availability and Oversight
Apache Airavata software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Airavata source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://airavata.apache.org/.

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organisations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Airavata", "Apache Airavata", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

#  #  #

Contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
press@apache.org
+1 617 921 8656

Posted at 12:00PM Oct 02, 2012 by Sally in General  |   | 

Monday Oct 01, 2012

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Stanbol as a Top-Level Project

European Union-seeded modular Open Source framework enables and extends semantic content management.

Forest Hill, MD – 1 October 2012 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Stanbol has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Created to extend traditional content management systems with semantic services, Apache Stanbol offers semantic services for automatic content enhancement, a process where plain text is automatically enriched with meta-data, e.g. about persons, places and organizations, from external data sources. Stanbol’s customized enhancement engines and process chains can be designed for user-specific enhancement tasks, enabling automatic content annotation and linking.

"The graduation also acknowledges the success of Apache Stanbol in bringing semantic technologies and content management communities together," explained Fabian Christ, Vice President of Apache Stanbol.

Providing reusable components that can be used to enhance content automatically is an important step in lifting existing content to a level that makes it more useable for all kinds of tasks, including a better search experience. Adding meta-data to content and linking the content to other existing resources adds the kind of value that could make the difference in many industrial use cases.

"Searchbox is leveraging the Stanbol framework for the Fusepool project as the core framework for processing unstructured and plain text information sources," explained Stéphane Gamard from Searchbox. "Thanks to Stanbol, different information sources can be processed, semantically enhanced and delivered to a front-end web application for an intuitive and advanced user experience."

Initially developed within the European Union's IKS EU Research Project, Stanbol entered the Apache Incubator in November 2010 and was quickly embraced as an ideal framework that makes semantic technologies usable for developers of content management systems. The Project provides a set of predefined enhancement engines including engines for language detection, named entity recognition, and engines for linking entities to linked open data (LOD) sources like DBPedia or geonames.org.

"CELI France, thanks to the integration with Stanbol, we were able to integrate our curriculum vitae (CV) parsing technology with main stream open source document management system, said Luca Dini from CELI.  "Moreover the final user experience was empowered by automatic linking with external LOD sources, which allowed true semantic reasoning over information linguistically extracted from CVs".

"GOSS Interactive demonstrated integration with Apache Stanbol to automatically add semantic mark-up and additional meta-data to managed content while it was still an incubator project," said Gary Ratcliffe from GOSS. "The graduation ensures the availability of Stanbol as a platform on which new semantic services can be developed in the future."

Availability and Oversight
Apache Stanbol software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Stanbol source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://stanbol.apache.org/. A timeline of the project's history through graduation is also available from the Apache Incubator.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Stanbol", "Apache Stanbol", and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

Posted at 12:00PM Oct 01, 2012 by Sally in General  |  Comments[1]  | 

Friday Sep 21, 2012

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Program, Speaker Lineup, Sponsors for ApacheCon Europe

The ApacheCon Europe Planning team today announced the program, speaker lineup, and sponsors for ApacheCon, the official conference of The Apache Software Foundation.

ApacheCon returns to Europe 5-8 November 2012 at the Rhein-Neckar-Arena in Sinsheim, Germany, attracting Open Source users, developers, gurus, students, novices, and enthusiasts to the newly-introduced "Community Edition" of ApacheCon --a smaller, less formal event aimed at a more technically-oriented audience, and featuring an array of sessions focused on Apache projects and initiatives, plus MeetUps, FastFeather and Community Tracks, Hackathon, and BarCamp. This is an ideal opportunity for technologists currently developing Apache-based solutions, as well as those interested in committing code to an Apache project, contributing to the Apache Incubator, or enhancing their Open Source products and community practices.

ApacheCon Europe Community Edition is organized and run by the Apache community; all content for ApacheCon has been selected by Apache Project Management Committees. 13 tracks explore key Open Source applications and issues, from Big Data and Smart Search to Cloud and Infrastructure, and include:

Apache Daily –-the tools, frameworks, and components used on a daily basis, such as Apache Logging, Apache Maven, Apache Ant, Apache Buildr, Apache Commons, and more.

ApacheEE –-all about Java Enterprise projects at the ASF, including Apache OpenWebBeans, Apache OpenEJB, Apache TomEE, Apache Tomcat, Apache MyFaces, Apache DeltaSpike, Apache BVal, and Apache OpenJPA.

Big Data [sponsored by Hortonworks] –-the ASF projects at the forefront of high-volume performance, innovation, and analytics, such as Apache Cassandra, Apache Hadoop, Apache HBase, Apache Hive, Apache Kafka, Apache Mahout, Apache Pig, Apache Whirr, Apache ZooKeeper and friends.

Camel in Action –-common problems, solutions, and best practices with Apache Camel.

Cloud [sponsored by Citrix and HP] –-many Apache initiatives play a key role in powering today's Cloud, from Apache Libcloud and Deltacloud, to Apache Whirr, Accumulo, and Cloudstack, to Apache Hadoop + friends.

Community –-if you've ever wanted to know how to become involved with the ASF --from becoming a Committer to bringing a project to the Apache Incubator to learning how the ASF works-- or are seeking information on how Open Source can benefit your organization or ways to improve your Open Source community experience, this is the place to roll up sleeves and get started.

Linked Data –-adopting, linking, and interoperating the Web of Data using the latest in annotating, processing, extracting, reasoning, and semantics with Apache Jena, Apache Any23 (Incubating), Apache Clerezza (Incubating), and Apache Stanbol (Incubating).

Lucene/Solr and Friends [co-located with Lucene Eurocon; sponsored by LucidWorks] –-the latest in search and analytics with Apache Lucene/Solr, Apache Tika, Apache ManifoldCF and more.

Modular Java –-developing and deploying applications in public and private Cloud environments using Apache Felix, Apache ACE, Apache Karaf, Apache Aries, Apache Sling.

NoSQL Database –-use cases and latest developments in dovetailing Big Data with Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, Apache CouchDB, Apache Accumulo, and more.

OFBiz –-the ins and outs of Apache OFBiz (Open For Business), the Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning suite of applications that integrate and automate many business processes, including catalogue management, eCommerce, CRM, warehousing, manufacturing, project management, HR functionality, FiCo, and more.

OpenOffice [sponsored by Oracle] –-the Apache OpenOffice ecosystem, with dedicated hackathons, MeetUps, and evening sessions, as well as use cases, and technical sessions on Writer, Calc, Impress, Math, Base, and Draw.

Web Infrastructure –-the backbone of the Web, including Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat, Apache Traffic Server, and more.

The full presentation list is available at http://www.apachecon.eu/schedule/list/

Registration and Special Savings
Register by 1 October 2012 to take advantage of Early Bird rates with savings up to €150. Students benefit with a super-discounted registration rate of €75, made possible by a special subsidy from Google. Sign up today at http://www.apachecon.eu/tickets/

Sponsorship
ApacheCon Europe is underwritten through a generous donation by Platinum Sponsor SAP. Joining them are Citrix, Google, Hortonworks, and LucidWorks at the Gold level; HP and Oracle at the Silver level; and evening events sponsor The Open Bastion. For sponsorship information, contact Melissa Warnkin at ea@apache.org or on +1 908 343 3214.

We look forward to seeing you in November!

-The ApacheCon Planning Committee


Posted at 12:16PM Sep 21, 2012 by Sally in General  |  Comments[2]  | 

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