The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Wednesday Nov 16, 2011

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Geronimo v3.0-beta-1

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Geronimo v3.0-beta-1 -– Leading Open Source Application Server Now Certified Java EE 6 Full- and Web Profile Compatible

Flexible, modular, and easy to manage, Apache Geronimo is the ideal platform for lightweight server deployments to full-scale enterprise environments, with complete support for Java EE 6 and OSGi programming models

16 November 2011 --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 that Apache Geronimo has obtained certification as a compatible implementation of both the Java EE 6 Full and Web Profiles. Apache Geronimo v3.0-beta-1 joins the Java EE 6 Reference Implementation as the only Open Source application server to be compatible with both Full and Web Profiles support.

"We're very happy to announce this significant milestone for the project," said Kevan Miller, Vice President of Apache Geronimo. "In addition to the Java EE 6 capabilities we've added to the product, Geronimo is now restructured to run on an OSGi kernel. Plus, we've added support for an enterprise OSGi application programming model -- a key enhancement for enterprise application developers wishing to take advantage of the modularity, dynamism, and versioning capabilities offered by OSGi".

Apache Geronimo integrates a number of ASF projects into an easy to manage, flexible, and modular application server. Java EE technologies utilized by Apache Geronimo include: Apache Tomcat, Apache OpenJPA, Apache OpenEJB, Apache MyFaces, Apache OpenWebBeans, Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Axis, Apache Wink, and Apache Bean Validation. OSGi technologies which are contained within Apache Geronimo include: Apache Aries, Apache Felix, and Apache Karaf. This wide array of Apache projects illustrates the breadth and depth of the software solutions developed at the Apache Software Foundation.

"Our move to OSGi has represented a signficant amount of internal restructuring, but this restructuring leaves us well positioned for future developments," explained Miller. "The Apache Aries, Apache Karaf, and Apache Felix projects have provided us a great base for our Geronimo 3.0 OSGi enhancments. The same is true for the Java EE technologies developed at the ASF: we couldn't have accomplished this without them".

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Geronimo v3.0-beta-1 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 Geronimo source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://geronimo.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 350 individual Members and 3,000 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, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

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

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

Wednesday Nov 09, 2011

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Tika™ v1.0

Standards-based, Content and Metadata Detection and Analysis Toolkit Powers Large-scale, Multi-lingual, Multi-format Repositories at Adobe, the Internet Archive, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and more.

9 November 2011 —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 Tika v1.0, an embeddable, lightweight toolkit for content detection and analysis.

"The Apache Tika v1.0 release is five years in the making, providing numerous improvements and new parsing formats," said Chris Mattmann, Apache Tika Vice President, Senior Computer Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and University of Southern California Adjunct Assistant Professor of Computer Science. "From a toolkit perspective, it's easy to integrate, and provides maximum functionality with little configuration."

With the increasing amount of information available on the Internet today, automatic information processing and retrieval is urgently needed to understand content across cultures, languages, and continents.

Apache Tika is a one-stop shop for identifying, retrieving, and parsing text and metadata from over 1,200 file formats including HTML, XML, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice/OpenDocument, PDF, images, ebooks/EPUB, Rich Text, compression and packaging formats, text/audio/image/video, Java class files and archives, email/mbox, and more.

Tika entered the Apache Incubator in 2007, became a sub-project of Apache Lucene in 2008, and graduated as an ASF Top-level Project (TLP) in April 2010. Apache Tika has been tested extensively in repositories exceeding 500 million documents across a variety of applications in industry, academia and government labs.

"At NASA, we leverage Apache Tika on several of our Earth science data system projects," explained Dan Crichton, Program Manager and Principal Computer Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Tika helps us processes hundreds of terabytes of scientific data in myriad formats and their associated metadata models. Using Tika with other Apache technologies such as OODT, Lucene, and Solr, we are able to automate, virtualize and increase the efficiency of NASA's science data processing pipeline."

Users and software applications use Apache Tika to explore the information landscape through flexible interfaces in Java, from the command line, REST-ful Web services, and also by consuming its functionality from a multitude of programming languages directly, including Python, .NET and C++. Tika defines a standard application programming interface (API) and makes use of existing libraries such Apache POI and PDFBox to detect and extract metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries.

"We've used Apache Tika extensively for a wide range of content extraction tasks, including parsing almost 600 million pages and documents from a large web crawl," said Ken Krugler, Founder and President of Scale Unlimited. "It's proven invaluable as a simple yet robust solution to the challenges of extracting text and metadata from the jungle of formats you find on the web."

"Hippo CMS 7 uses Apache Jackrabbit to index content repositories containing as many as 500,000 documents," explained Arjé Cahn, CTO of Hippo. "We are exploring ways that Apache Tika can enhance access to metadata in our faceted navigation feature, which may result in a possible future patch."

Availability and Oversight

As with all Apache products, Apache Tika 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 Tika source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://tika.apache.org/.

Apache Tika in Action!

Apache Tika v1.0 will be featured at ApacheCon's Content Technologies track on 10 November 2011. PMC Chair Mattmann will describe the modern genesis of the project and its ecosystem, as well as the newly-launched Manning Publications book, "Tika in Action" co-authored by Mattmann and Zitting.

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 350 individual Members and 3,000 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, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

"Apache", "Apache Tika", 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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Tuesday Oct 18, 2011

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Cassandra™ v1.0

Highly-scalable, Open Source "NoSQL" Distributed Database Handles Massive Workloads for Cisco, Constant Contact, DataStax, Digg, IBM, Netflix, Rackspace, Twitter, Walmart Labs, and more.

Forest Hill, MD – 18 October 2011 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache Cassandra™ v1.0. The highly-scalable, distributed 
"NoSQL" database plays a key role in Cloud computing by quickly handling massive workloads in real time with minimal disruption to services or systems.

"Dealing with very large amounts of data in realtime is a must for most businesses today," said Jonathan Ellis, Vice President of Apache Cassandra. "Cassandra accommodates high query volumes, provides enterprise-grade reliability, and scales easily to meet future growth requirements – while using fewer resources than traditional solutions."

Apache Cassandra is successfully used by large scale organizations such as Cisco, Cloudkick, Digg, Rackspace, Reddit, Twitter, and Walmart Labs to affordably process massive data sets in real-time across large server clusters. The largest Cassandra production cluster to date exceeds 300 terabytes of data over 400 machines.

"As the most-widely deployed mobile rich media advertising platform, Medialets uses Apache Cassandra™ for handling time series based logging from our production operations infrastructure," said Joe Stein, Chief Architect of Medialets. "We store contiguous counts for data points for each second, minute, hour, day, month so we can review trends over time as well as the current real time set of information for tens of thousands of data points. Cassandra makes it possible for us to manage this intensive data set and the release of 1.0 makes it that much easier."

Deployed across an array of applications, from barcode scanning and geospatial databases to storing user account information and activity logs, Apache Cassandra is easily scalable, efficient, and  performant, typically handling over 5,000 requests per second per core. Innovative uses of Apache Cassandra include:

  • AppScale – back-end for Google App Engine applications
  • Clearspring – tracking URL sharing and serving over 200 million daily view requests
  • Cloudtalk –  creating messaging applications
  • Constant Contact –  powering social media marketing applications
  • Formspring – counting/storing social graph data for 26 million accounts with 10 million daily responses
  • Mahalo.com – recording user Q & A activity logs and topics 
  • Netflix – streaming services back-end database
  • Openwave – distributed storage mechanism for next generation messaging platform
  • OpenX – storing and replicating advertisements and targeting data for ad delivery over 130 nodes
  • Plaxo – analyzing 3 billion contacts against public data sources and identifying 600 million unique contacts
  • RockYou – recording every single click in real time for 50 million online gaming users
  • Urban Airship – mobile service hosting for over 160 million application installs across 80 million unique devices 
  • Yakaz – storing millions of images and social data


Matthew Conway, CTO of Backupify said, "Apache Cassandra™ makes it possible for us to build a business around really high write loads in a scalable fashion without having to build and operate our own sharding layer. The release of Cassandra 1.0 is an exciting milestone for the project and we look forward to exploring the new features and performance enhancements."

"We utilize Apache Cassandra™ to deliver DataStax Enterprise, a distributed data platform that makes it easy for customers to build, deploy, and operate elastically scalable on-premise and cloud-optimized applications," explained Billy Bosworth, CEO of DataStax. "We chose Cassandra to power this platform because of it's real-time scalability, operational simplicity, and above all, its active community of dedicated developers. Version 1.0 is the culmination of their efforts and we look forward to seeing Cassandra 1.0 power our customers applications."

Originally developed at Facebook in 2008, Cassandra entered the Apache Incubator in 2009, and graduated as an Apache Top-Level Project (TLP) in February 2010. Apache Cassandra v1.0 will be featured in the "Data Handling & Analytics" track at ApacheCon, 7-11 November 2011, in Vancouver, Canada. To register, visit http://apachecon.com/.

Availability and Oversight
Apache Cassandra software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a Project Management Committee (PMC) that guides the Project's day-to-day operations, community development, and product releases. Apache Cassandra source code, downloads, documentation, mailing lists, 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 350 individual Members and 3,000 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, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, HP, Hortonworks, IBM, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

"Apache", "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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Friday Oct 14, 2011

The Apache Software Foundation Statement on Apache OpenOffice.org

On 1 June 2011, Oracle Corporation submitted the OpenOffice.org code base to The Apache Software Foundation. That submission was accepted, and the project is now being developed as a podling in the Apache Incubator under the ASF's meritocratic process informally dubbed "The Apache Way". 

OpenOffice.org is now officially part of the Apache family. 

The project is known as Apache OpenOffice.org (incubating).

Over its 12-year history, the ASF has welcomed contributions from individuals and organizations alike, but, as a policy, does not solicit code donations. The OpenOffice.org code base was not pursued by the ASF prior to its acceptance into the Apache Incubator. 

The Apache OpenOffice.org Podling Project Management Committee (PPMC) and Committer list are nearly 10 times greater than those of other projects in the Apache Incubator, demonstrating the tremendous interest in this project.

As with many highly-visible products, there has been speculation and conjecture about the future of OpenOffice.org at Apache. More recently, destructive statements have been published by both members of the greater FOSS community and former contributors to the original OpenOffice.org product, suggesting that the project has failed during the 18 weeks since its acceptance into the Apache Incubator.

Whilst the ASF operates in the open –our code and project mailing lists are publicly accessible– ASF governance permits for projects to make information and code freely available when the project deems them ready to be released. Apache OpenOffice.org is not at risk.

As an end-user-facing product, OpenOffice.org is unique in comparison to the other nearly 170 products currently being developed, incubated, and shepherded at the ASF. Considered to be "ingredient brands", countless competing Web server, Cloud computing, data handling, and other solutions behind the products serving millions of users worldwide are, unbeknown to most, "Powered by Apache".

And we're OK with that.

More than 70 project Committers are actively collaborating to ensure that the future of the OpenOffice.org code base and community are in alignment with The Apache Way. The project's extensive plans include assessing the elements necessary to update a product that hasn't had an official release in nearly a year; parts of the product's functionality encumbered by non-Apache-Licensed components; and a code base that has been forked and maintained by a community pursuing market dominance. As such, it is critical that we remain pragmatic about the project's next steps during this transition phase.

We understand that stakeholders of a project with a 10+ year history --be they former product managers or casual users-- may be unfamiliar with The Apache Way and question its methods. Those following the project's migration to process and culture unique to the Apache community may challenge the future sustainability of the project.

Such concerns are not atypical with the incubation of Open Source projects with well-established communities -- the successful graduation of Apache Subversion and Apache SpamAssassin, among others, are proof that The Apache Way works.

As an all-volunteer organization, we do not compensate any contributors to develop Apache code. We do, however, support those individuals with relevant expertise to pursue consulting/remuneration opportunities with interested parties, but must reiterate that they are barred from doing so on behalf of the ASF or any Apache initiatives -- be they Top-level Projects (TLPs) or emerging products in the Apache Incubator and Labs. Otherwise, they would be in violation of the Apache trademark policy, which the ASF strongly defends in order to protect its communities.

At the ASF, the answer is openness, not further fragmentation. There is ample room for multiple solutions in the marketplace that are Powered by Apache. We welcome differences of opinion: a requirement at Apache is that a healthy project be supported by an open, diverse community comprising multiple organizations and individual contributors.

We congratulate the LibreOffice community on their success over their inaugural year and wish them luck in their future endeavors. We look forward to opening up the dialogue between Open Document Format-oriented communities to deepen understanding and cease the unwarranted spread of misinformation.

We welcome input and participation in the form of constructive contributions to Apache OpenOffice.org. There are myriad ways to help, from code development and documentation to community relations and "help desk" forums support to licensing and localization, and more. 

The way to move this forward is via the ASF, which owns the OpenOffice.org trademark and official code base. This is our chance to be able to pull together our talents towards a cohesive goal and protect the project's ecosystem.

At a minimum, we owe that to the hundreds of millions of users of OpenOffice.org.

-- the ASF Press team and Apache OpenOffice.org incubating mentors


- Join the Apache OpenOffice.org project MeetUp at ApacheCon, 7-11 November 2011 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. For more information, visit http://apachecon.com/
- For more on Apache OpenOffice.org see http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/
- For more information on the Apache Incubator see http://incubator.apache.org/
- The ASF trademark policy can found at http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/


"Apache", "OpenOffice.org", 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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Tuesday Oct 11, 2011

Hats off to the Apache Subversion team on the milestone release of Subversion v1.7.0!

The Apache Software Foundation congratulates Apache Subversion, the popular Open Source version control system and software configuration management tool.

The award-winning project entered the Apache Incubator in November 2009 and became a Top-level Project (TLP) twelve months later. Apache Subversion is used by millions of companies around the globe, as well as by leading Apache projects such as Ant and Maven, as part of their overall application lifecycle management strategy.

In addition, Subversion is widely used throughout the Open Source community, including CodePlex, Django, FreeBSD, Free Pascal, GCC, Google Code, MediaWiki, Mono, PHP, Ruby, and SourceForge. According to Forrester Research, Apache Subversion is the recognized leader in the Standalone Software Configuration and Change Management category.

For the complete list of features, release notes, downloads, documentation and supporting information, as well as ways to participate in the project, please see http://subversion.apache.org/

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Tuesday Oct 04, 2011

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache TomEE Certified as Java EE 6 Web Profile Compatible

Groundbreaking, lightweight, scalable, all-Apache stack ideal for use in enterprise-grade Cloud applications

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache TomEE has obtained certification as Java EE 6 Web Profile Compatible Implementation.

Making its certification debut at JavaOne, Apache TomEE (pronounced "Tommy") is the Java Enterprise Edition of Apache Tomcat (Tomcat + Java EE = TomEE) that unites several quality Java enterprise projects including Apache OpenEJB, Apache OpenWebBeans, Apache OpenJPA, Apache MyFaces and more.

"It is with great pride that we're announcing Apache TomEE as a certified implementation of the Java EE 6 Web Profile," said David Blevins, Vice President of Apache OpenEJB and original co-developer of TomEE. "Apache TomEE is the newest addition to the Java EE server space, standing alongside the likes of GlassFish, JBoss, and Apache Geronimo."

Developers build applications using Java EE-certified products to ensure portability across Java Enterprise Edition-compatible solutions. Apache TomEE is one of only six certified implementations available to the industry today.

Redefining Enterprise Cloud; Unifying Communities

The three core design objectives for TomEE were: 1) do not alter Tomcat; 2) maintain simplicity; and 3) avoid architecture overhead. This enables developers to quickly and easily build highly performant lightweight enterprise solutions using leading Apache projects without the need for complex modifications or customization. Apache TomEE's integration of Apache OpenWebBeans, Apache MyFaces, Apache ActiveMQ, Apache OpenJPA, and Apache CXFis simple, to-the-point, and focused on the singular task of delivering the Java EE 6 Web Profile in a minimalist fashion.

The simple, all-Apache stack is both incredibly light and fully embeddable, making it ideal for testing and usage in today's evolution of the enterprise Cloud, where the key to scalability is hundreds of tiny servers, as opposed to the traditional definition of how large your servers. Apache TomEE boasts groundbreaking performance in the following areas:

- Size: exceptionally small (about 24MB for the entire Web profile), consumes very little resources;

- Memory: TCK (Technology Compatibility Kit) passed with no additional memory settings beyond the default – a first in Java EE; and

- Speed: runs exceptionally fast in embedded mode: start/deploy/test/undeploy/stop in 2-3 seconds.

"No longer do developers have to ask 'Do we use Tomcat or Java EE?' at the start of a project, as has been the case for the last 10 years," explained Blevins. "These two camps have historically been separate, and certification is a major step in unifying these communities. With TomEE, developers can now retire untested legacy stacks and use a reliable product that doesn't deviate from the Tomcat that they know and love."

Blevins and members of the Apache OpenEJB community will be presenting several sessions, including "TomEE – Tomcat with a Kick", in the "Servers/Tomcat & Geronimo" track at ApacheCon, 7-11 November 2011, in Vancouver, Canada. To register, visit http://apachecon.com/

Availability and Oversight
Apache TomEE software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by the Apache OpenEJB Project Management Committee (PMC) that guides the Project's day-to-day operations, community development, and product releases. Apache TomEE is certified on Amazon EC2 t1.micro, m1.small, and m1.large 32bit images; certification on 64bit EC2 images and other Cloud platforms are in the Project's future plans. Those Cloud vendors wishing to donate resources for TomEE to be certified on their platforms are encouraged to contact the Apache OpenEJB Project for information on how to participate. Apache TomEE source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://openejb.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 350 individual Members and 3,000 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, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, HP, Hortonworks, IBM, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

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

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Tuesday Sep 27, 2011

The Apache Software Foundation Announces 10th Anniversary of Apache Lucene

Powers smart search and indexing solutions for AOL, Apple, Comcast, Disney, IBM, LinkedIn, Twitter, Wikipedia, and more.

Forest Hill, MD – 27 September 2011 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced the 10th anniversary of Apache Lucene.

The Lucene information retrieval software was first developed in 1997, entered the ASF as a sub-project of the Apache Jakarta project in 2001, and became a standalone, Top-Level Project (TLP) in 2005. Apache Top-Level Projects and their communities demonstrate that they are well-governed under the Foundation’s meritocratic, consensus-driven process and principles.

"Ten years ago, Apache provided Lucene a home where it could build a solid community. Today we can see the fruit of that community, both through the wide breadth of Lucene-based applications deployed, and through the depth of improvements to Lucene made in the past decade," said Doug Cutting, ASF Chairman and original Lucene creator.

Apache Lucene powers smart search and indexing for eCommerce, financial services, business intelligence, travel, social networking, libraries, publishing, government, and defense solutions.

"Lucene has changed the world by opening doors that didn't exist before it arrived on the Open Source scene,” said ASF Member and Apache Lucene Committer Erik Hatcher. “Lucene has massively disrupted the enterprise/proprietary search market, with wide adoption around the globe in every industry.”

Highly performant, Apache Lucene is in use across an array of applications, from mobile to Internet scale, and powers enterprise-grade search solutions for AOL, Apple, IBM (including its artificial intelligence-driven supercomputer Watson), LinkedIn, Netflix, Wikipedia, Zappos, and many other global organizations.

"When it arrived to ASF, Lucene immediately made a huge impact --Lucene was one of those technologies that made a whole generation of businesses possible-- it was fast, easy to use, free, and had a growing community of users and developers. Apache Lucene can be found in an amazing number of products and services we all know and use, as well as in products and services we have never heard of,” said ASF Member and Apache Lucene Committer Otis Gospodnetic.

"While it's been six years since I joined the Lucene community, the last two were certainly the most exciting,” said Simon Willnauer, Vice President of Apache Lucene.

Current Apache Lucene sub-projects are PyLucene and Open Relevance; other sub-projects, including Droids, Lucene.Net, and Lucy, have spun out of the project and are undergoing further development in the Apache Incubator with the intention of becoming standalone TLPs. Solr, the high-speed Open Source enterprise search platform, has merged into the Lucene project itself, whilst former Lucene sub-projects Hadoop, Mahout, Nutch, and Tika have all successfully graduated as autonomous Apache Hadoop, Apache Mahout, Apache Nutch, and Apache Tika TLPs.

Originally written in Java, Apache Lucene is available in many programming languages such as Perl, C#, C++, PHP, Python, and Ruby. “Now, 10 years later, Apache Lucene is backed by a large community of users, contributors and developers with incredible energy poured into Lucene every hour of every day of the year," said Gospodnetic, who is also co-author of Lucene in Action, and founder of Sematext International.

“Even after 10 years, it seems this blazing community and codebase hasn't reached its potential yet,” added Willnauer. “I'm proud to be part of this community and look forward to another decade of Open Source Search."

Hatcher, who is also co-author of Lucene in Action and co-founder of Lucid Imagination, added, “if you need search (and you do!), Lucene is the best core technology choice."

Hatcher, Willnauer, and other members of the Apache Lucene community will be presenting sessions on data handling and analytics –a.k.a. “Lucene and Friends”-- including what's upcoming in Apache Lucene 4.0 (with performance improvements up to 20,000% from previous versions and more) at ApacheCon, 7-11 November 2011, in Vancouver, Canada. To register, visit http://apachecon.com/

Availability and Oversight

Apache Lucene 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 Lucene source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://lucene.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 350 individual Members and 3,000 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, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, HP, Hortonworks, IBM, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

"Apache" and “Apache Lucene” are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Tuesday Sep 13, 2011

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

Open Source Cloud quick-start toolkit in use at Cloudera, Cloudsoft, Omixon, Outerthought, and more.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF),  the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Whirr has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).

First developed inside the Apache Hadoop project in 2007 to quickly start and manage clusters running on Cloud services, Whirr entered the Apache Incubator in 2010. Apache Top-Level Projects and their communities demonstrate that they are well-governed under the Foundation’s meritocratic, consensus-driven process and principles.

"The Whirr project has demonstrated its maturity by graduating from the Apache Incubator," explained Tom White, Vice President of Apache Whirr. "We are pleased to offer users an easy way to get services up and running on Cloud hardware in minutes."

Apache Whirr provides a Cloud-neutral way to run a properly-configured system quickly through libraries, common service API, smart defaults, and command line tool. Whirr is being used for proof of concepts and a way to try out new Cloud services utilizing a variety of Apache products that include Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, and ZooKeeper. An example of this is enterprise software providers Cloudera, who use Whirr to make it easy to try out their CDH product and run distributed clustered services.

Outerthought CEO Steven Noels said, "Outerthought was looking for a foundation framework for the enterprise cluster install tool of its Apache HBase-based Big Data platform Lily, so Apache Whirr seemed like a natural fit. Whirr lived up to its promises, and we found a welcoming and helpful development team to collaborate with. Lily is 'Smart Data at Scale, made Easy', and part of that goal is now being realized thanks to Apache Whirr."

"Omixon provides complex next-gen sequencing bioinformatic pipelines on the cloud where on demand we need to fire-up and control Apache Hadoop clusters of different sizes,” said Tibor Kiss, Senior Software Engineer at Omixon. “Whirr was the perfect integration technology between our java based infrastructure management layer and the managed Hadoop clusters. Thanks to Apache Whirr, the resulting software is stable and easy to maintain."

"Having been involved since its inception I am delighted to see Whirr graduate. Whirr has proven easy to develop against and explain to others, leading to its strong community," said Adrian Cole, Founder, jclouds and Chief Evangelist at Cloudsoft. "We are pleased to announce commercial support for Apache Whirr, as well the underlying jclouds infrastructure, is under active development at Cloudsoft and should be available by year end at the latest."

"Apache Whirr's Cloud-neutral way to run services means that developers don't have to worry about the idiosyncrasies of each provider," added White. "We encourage users to get started today with 'Whirr in 5 Minutes' and to build service plugins for additional services."

Availability and Oversight
Apache Whirr 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 Whirr source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources including "Whirr in 5 Minutes" and Quick Start guides are available at http://whirr.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 350 individual Members and 3,000 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, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, HP, Hortonworks, IBM, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

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

# # #

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

Tuesday Aug 30, 2011

The Apache Software Foundation Announces 10th Anniversary of Apache POI

Open Source project in use at Deutsche Bank, IBM, J.P. Morgan, NASA, Siemens and more.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF),  the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced the 10th anniversary of Apache POI. First created in 2001, Apache POI's cross-platform Open Source Java APIs allow users to read and write various file formats from the Microsoft Office suite of applications, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Visio, and Publisher.

Apache POI is deployed in many highly-visible environments including CERN, Deutsche Bank, Freddie Mac, IBM, J.P. Morgan, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA, SAP, and Siemens, among others. In addition, Apache POI is also used in Open Source projects such as Alfresco, JasperReports and Apache Tika.

"Apache POI's powerful solutions give users the ability to create and maintain many Office OpenXML (OOXML) and OLE2-based file formats," said Yegor Kozlov, Vice President of Apache POI. "With POI, you can do almost anything that you can with Microsoft Office products, only using Java."

The latest stable release of the project is v3.7 (October 2010) and the latest development version is 3.8beta4 (August 2011). Highlights include:

- the ability to read and write OLE2 files, including .xls, .doc, and .ppt, as well as MFC serialization API based file formats;

- the ability to read and write OOXML files, including .xlsx, .docx, and .pptx;

- a low-level API to support Open Packaging Conventions using openxml4j;

- highly-developed Java APIs for Excel workbooks, Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations;

- support for Outlook messages and attachments;

- converters for Excel and Word documents to streamline document production and consumption in HTML and XSLF-FO formats; and

- porting other OOXML and OLE2 formats

"Apache POI is a vital component of WSO2's Middleware Platforms and Open PaaS. WSO2 Governance Registry makes use of Apache POI to extract keywords to build its search index for MS Office Documents stored within the resource repository. Meanwhile, WSO2 Data Services Server relies on Apache POI to access MS Excel spreadsheets as Data Sources; making it possible to read data from any Excel Sheet and expose them through Data Services." said Senaka Fernando, Apache Member and Governance Registry Product Manager at WSO2.

In addition, POI's robust spreadsheet API enables advanced formatting, graphics, conditional formatting, data validations and evaluation of Excel formulas. Its streaming spreadsheet API increases performance when used for very large spreadsheet production with limited heap space.

"The spreadsheet libraries in Apache POI have been invaluable in our efforts to streamline workflows for renewable-energy infrastructure modeling and analysis," said Brian Bush, Principal Engineer, Energy Forecasting & Modeling Group, US Department of Energy National Renewable Energy Laboratory. "The clean and robust API that POI provides made it easy for us to embed externally provided spreadsheets within our applications and to evaluate the formulae within those spreadsheets as part of a larger set of analytic computations. We also found that POI opened new avenues for exposing spreadsheets as Web services and for Apache Ant-based regression testing of spreadsheets."

To improve functionality, the Apache POI project often collaborates with other Apache projects and Open Source communities that include Apache Cocoon, Lucene, OpenOffice, and Tika.

"We've donated components directly to those projects for POI-enabling them, and welcome additional contributions," added Kozlov.

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache POI 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 POI source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://poi.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 350 individual Members and 3,000 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, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

"Apache" is a trademark of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

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

Wednesday Aug 24, 2011

Belated congratulations to the Apache Turbine team on a decade at the ASF and the milestone release of Turbine-4.0-M1!

The Apache Software Foundation raises a glass to Apache Turbine, the rapid-development Web application framework that's been a part of the Foundation over the past decade.

Originally a sub-project of the Apache Jakarta Open Source Java solutions, Apache Turbine became a Top-level Project (TLP) in 2007. Turbine is a servlet based framework that allows experienced Java developers to quickly build secure Web applications. Parts of Turbine can also be used independently from its Web portion to be easily used in other applications.

Websites that use Apache Turbine include JRank, FlashCan, JXTA.org, OpenOffice.org, and Tigris.org. The project has also influenced numerous projects such as Apache DB Torque, Apache Maven and several Apache Commons components.

In addition, the project announced the release of Turbine-4.0-M1. This milestone release is not intended for production, but rather for verification of newly-integrated Fulcrum services and to gain experience migrating a 2.3.3 installation to the new architecture.

The project is seeking feedback from the community to release a stable version of Turbine later this year. For more information, please see http://s.apache.org/bXV

# # #

Monday Jul 25, 2011

Media Alert: Meet Members, Officers, and Committers of The Apache Software Foundation at OSCON 2011

WHO: The Apache Software Foundation; Apache powers half the Internet, terabytes of data, teraflops of operations, billions of objects, and enhances the lives of countless users and developers. Established in 1999 to shepherd, develop, and incubate Open Source innovations "The Apache Way", the ASF oversees 150+ projects led by a volunteer community of over 350 individual Members and 3,000 Committers across six continents.

WHAT: The ASF returns to OSCON, providing conference participants and members of the media and analyst community an opportunity to meet with members of the Apache community. Attendees can learn about how the ASF works, and discuss Apache projects, from servers to build tools to Cloud computing --from Abdera to Zookeper. Individuals and topics include:

1) ASF directors and officers:

- Greg Stein, ASF Vice Chairman and VP Apache Subversion
- Craig Russell, ASF Secretary
- Serge Knystautas, VP Fundraising
- Sally Khudairi, VP Marketing & Publicity


2) ASF Members presenting at OSCON:

- David Blevins, VP Apache OpenEJB (session: "Apache TomEE -- Tomcat with a Kick")
- Paul Fremantle, VP Apache Synapse (sessions: "PaaS Times: understanding Open Source Platform-as-a-Service" and "Stratos - an Open Source Cloud Platform")
- Jeff Genender, Apache Geronimo, OpenEJB, ServiceMix, CXF, and Mina Committer ("Everything You Wanted to Know about Open Source that Nobody Told You")
- Erik Hatcher, Apache Lucene Project Management Committee and Apache Solr Core Committer (training: "Solr Application Development Tutorial")
- Leif Hedstrom, VP Apache Traffic Server (session: "Deploying Apache Traffic Server")
- Noirin Plunkett, ASF Executive Vice President (session: "How to Win Friends and Write Documentation")
- Paul Querna, Apache Libcloud Project Management Committee and former VP ASF Infrastructure (sessions: "Core Team Q&A" and "Real Projects Built In Node – CloudKick")
- Gianugo Rabellino, VP Apache XML (session: "Behind The Scenes: Microsoft, Open Source, And Interoperability - What's Ahead!")


3) Code Committers from various Apache projects, including Chemistry, Hadoop, HTTP Server, Shindig, Traffic Server, and more.

In addition, visitors can enter to win free admission to ApacheCon 2011. This year's theme is "Open Enterprise Solutions, Cloud Computing, and Community Leadership", featuring dozens of sessions that help accelerate success in the use, development, and deployment of Apache projects across the Open Source ecosystem.

WHEN: 
26 July – Opening Reception 5-6PM
27 July – 10AM-5PM; Booth Crawl 6-7PM
28 July – 10AM-5PM (Expo close)

To view the complete OSCON schedule, visit http://www.oscon.com/

WHERE: Apache Booth #725 – OSCON Expo Hall, Oregon Convention Center. 

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 350 individual Members and 3,000 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, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.


For more information, contact:
Sally Khudairi
Vice President
The Apache Software Foundation
sk@apache.org
+1 617 921 8656
+44 (0) 20 3239 9686 

# # #

Tuesday Jun 14, 2011

Apache Traffic Server v3.0.0 Features-At-A-Glance

In the works over the past year (v2.0 was released May 2010), Apache Traffic Server v3.0.0 is the result of contributions from more than 30 developers and contributors. Technical highlights include:

I. Contributions

- Over 1,000 "commits" (code, patches, or documentation written directly to the code repository);
- 380+ bug tickets resolved;
- 10 releases have been made during the development phase (v2.1.0 - 2.1.9)

II. New features/improvements

- Full 64-bit support;
- Client side IPv6 support;
- WCCP (Web Cache Communication Protocol);
- Clustering is functional and supported (many benefits include an efficient distributed cache);
- Major plug-in API improvements, making the APIs more feature rich and easier to use;
- Support for many platforms, including OSX, Solaris and FreeBSD (Linux, of course, was always supported);
- New improved RAM cache algorithms, for better performance and memory utilization
- Many configurations are now configurable per transaction (or per mapping rule)
- Many improvements in statistics and management APIs;
- Multiple accept threads, and a dedicated DNS thread:
- Build environment is now much more flexible, and package owner friendly;
- Many, many bug fixes for improved stability and functionality.

III. Performance improvements

- Overall throughput is 2-3x improved over v2.0 (depending on the traffic patterns)
- Response latency is up to 5x better than v2.0
- Benchmark: Serving small objects out of RAM cache, a high end server has showed over 220,000 requests / second
- Benchmark: Serving small objects that are not cacheable, the same high end server could proxy 100,000 requests / second
(NOTE: all benchmarks are on local network, with keep-alive)


Get Involved! Apache Traffic Server downloads, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://trafficserver.apache.org/.

# # #

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Traffic Server v3.0.0

Highly-Performant Cloud Computing Service Serves Dynamic Content, Billions of Objects, and Terrabytes of Data for Large-Scale Deployments

14 June 2011 —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 Traffic Server v3.0.0.

Apache Traffic Server is a Cloud Computing "edge" service, able to handle requests in and out of the Cloud, both by serving static content (images, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files), and routing requests for dynamic content to a Web server (such as the Apache HTTP Server).

"Traffic Server is battle hardened, serving terrabytes of data in real-life deployments where immediate content delivery is critical," said Apache Traffic Server Vice President Leif Hedstrom. "V3.0.0 builds upon that foundation, with new features and functionality, improved efficiency and performance, increased uptime, and overall easier to use.”

Apache Traffic Server is a fast, scalable, and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server designed to improve:

 - Caching: improves response time while reducing server load and bandwidth needs by caching and reusing frequently-requested Web pages, images, and Web service calls;
 - Proxying: easily add keep-alive, filter or anonymize content requests, or add load balancing by adding a proxy layer;
 - Speed: scales well on modern SMP hardware, handling tens of thousands of requests per second;
 - Extensibility: APIs allow for customized plug-ins, from modifying headers and content to implementing new protocol handlers;
 - Reliability: successfully handles hundreds of terrabytes of data, both as forward and reverse proxies

Apache Traffic Server v.3.0.0 has been benchmarked to handle more than of 200,000 requests per second -- a 277% improvement over v2.0’s already-impressive rates. Used in production in a variety of large-scale deployments, companies such as Yahoo! rely on Apache Traffic Server to handle over 400 terrabytes of traffic, and has used the project to serve more than 30 billion objects daily across its various properties including the Yahoo! homepage, and its Sports, Mail, and Finance sites.

Apache Traffic Server entered the Apache Incubator in June 2009, graduated as an Apache Top-Level Project (TLP) in April 2010, and released v2.0 the following month. For technical highlights, please refer to the Apache Traffic Server v3.0.0 Features At-A-Glance at http://s.apache.org/7Or.

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Traffic Server 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 Traffic Server source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://trafficserver.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 300 individual Members and 2,500 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, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, SpringSource, Talend, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

"Apache" and "Apache Traffic Server" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

# # #

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

Tuesday Jun 07, 2011

Meritocracy in Action: The Apache Membership Process

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) will be holding its annual Members' meeting this July. 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. 

ASF Members are elected bi-annually. New Members elected at the January 2011 Members' meeting are:

Greg Brown, Michael Busch, Jack Cai, Adriano Crestani, Paul Joseph Davis, Jean-Sebastien Delfino, Ted Dunning, Mohammad Nour El-Din, Julian Foad, Igor Galic, Alan Gates, Oliver Heger, Colm O Heigeartaigh, Arnaud Heritier, Jeremy Hughes, Patrick Hunt, Nandika Jayawardana, Willem Ning Jiang, Supun Kamburugamuva, Yegor Kozlov, Ken Krugler, Damitha Kumarage, Olivier Lamy, Paul Lindner, Ruwan Linton, Jimmy Lv, Rick McGuire, Mark Miller, Julien Nioche, Johan Oskarsson, Gerhard Petracek, Joerg Schaible, Theo Schlossnagle, Zoe Slattery, Stefan Sperling, Ulrich Staerk, Amila Suriarachchi, Tommaso Teofili, Tammo van Lessen, Gert Vanthienen, Igor Vaynberg, Kanchana Welagedara.

Welcome all, and thank you for your contributions to the Foundation thus far!

The complete list of ASF members and committers is available on people.apache.org. For more information on how the ASF works, visit http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html.

# # #

Wednesday Jun 01, 2011

Incubation at Apache: What's it all about?

More Projects Than Ever Submitted to Become a Part of The Apache Software
Foundation

The success and reputation of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as one of the most influential Open Source organizations is undisputed. Launched 12 years ago with the Apache HTTP Server, the all-volunteer ASF currently develops and shepherds nearly 170 projects, including Top-Level Projects (TLPs) and new initiatives in the Apache Incubator and Labs.

Apache products power more than 203 million Websites (half the Internet!) and countless mission-critical applications worldwide. More than a dozen Apache projects form the foundation of today's Cloud computing. Five of the top 10 Open Source downloads are Apache projects.

"Dozens of external projects have sought to become a part of the ASF to improve the quality of their code and participate in a larger community," explained ASF President Jim Jagielski.

Incubation is the first step for a project to be considered among the diverse Open Source initiatives overseen by the ASF. A submitted project and its community will join the more than 50 projects in the Apache Incubator, and will benefit from the Foundation's widely-emulated meritocratic process, stewardship, outreach, support, community events, and guiding principles that are affectionately known as "The Apache Way".

"We welcome highly-focused, emerging projects from individual contributors, as well as those with robust developer communities, global user bases, and strong corporate backing," added Jagielski. "The ASF's organizational, legal, financial, and infrastructure support gives incubating projects the ability to provide valuable software to millions of users without having to worry about liability. Today's submission of the OpenOffice.org code base is testament to our track record for successfully incubating highly-established, well-respected projects such as Apache SpamAssassin and Apache Subversion."

Incubating projects (known as "podlings") benefit from hands-on mentorship from other Apache contributors and are guided on an array of processes and principles within the Foundation, including adopting the Apache voting structure and growing a vibrant and diverse community. Jim Jagielski is the proposed podling mentor for the OpenOffice.org community during the incubation process.

Podlings that demonstrate that their community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's consensus-driven process, release all code under the Apache License v2.0, and fulfill the responsibilities of an incubating project move one step closer to graduation to a TLP. Upon a Project's maturation to a TLP, a Project Management Committee (PMC) is formed to guide its day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases.

ASF Projects that have graduated from the Apache Incubator over the past year include Apache Cassandra, Apache Chemistry, Apache Click, Apache Libcloud, Apache OODT, Apache Shindig, Apache Traffic Server, and Apache UIMA.

For more information on the Apache Incubator, please visit
http://incubator.apache.org/.

# # #

Media Contact:
Sally Khudairi
+1 617 921 8656
press@apache.org

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