The Apache Incubator is getting Hadoop-heavy. The Apache Software Foundation today graduated a number of projects within that realm to its incubator. Meanwhile, at the head of the class, the Apache Traffic Server, a caching proxy server, moved up to become a top-level project at the Foundation.

“Becoming a Top-Level Project is a vote of confidence from the Foundation at large, demonstrating a project has proven its ability to be properly self-governed,” said Foundation chairman Jim Jagielski. “We are proud of our Committers’ dedication in building robust communities under the ASF process known as ‘The Apache Way.’ ”

The new class of Apache Incubator projects are all former sub-projects of existing hatchling projects. This year’s class consisted of three former Lucene sub-projects and two former Hadoop sub-projects.

From Hadoop comes Avro and HBase, two projects aimed at expanding the capabilities of the Hadoop platform.

HBase is aimed at building something similar to Google’s Big Table inside of Hadoop. It gives Hadoop random read/write access to tables with potentially billions of rows. Avro is a fast data serialization system for Hadoop.

The remaining three new projects are Mahout, Nutch and Tika. Nutch is a Web search engine based on and formerly a sub-project of Lucene; Tika is used to detect data types and provide analysis thereof.

Mahout, an effort to build artificial intelligence construction tools