The Apache Foundation has elected a new board of directors, made up mostly of old directors. The board, announced July 15, arrived in time to see oversee the release of version 1.0 of the Apache Formatting Objects Processor (FOP) and the release of version 2.4 of JMeter.
The board now consists of Shane Curcuru, Doug Cutting, Bertrand Delacretaz, Roy T. Fielding, Jim Jagielski, Sam Ruby, Noirin Shirley, Greg Stein and Henri Yandell. Of them, Shirley is the only member to not have served previously on the board. Shirley comes to the board after serving as the Foundation’s vice president of event planning and a documentation writer for various Apache projects.
Getting a second term on the board is Doug Cutting, creator of the Apache Hadoop project. Justin Erenkrantz, president of the Apache Software Foundation, said that Hadoop remains the most active project at Apache, thanks to numerous related sub-projects that were spun out into the incubator earlier this year.
The new board of directors will also be overseeing the continuing transition of Subversion into the Apache process. “Subversion is doing great,” said Erenkrantz. “The community is finishing some major plumbing work that should deliver some significant client-side performance improvements.
“We are focusing on starting the 1.7 release cycle in the fall. A number of companies continue to contribute to Subversion (such as CollabNet and elego), [and] some new companies have stepped up their contributions within the community, like WANdisco.”
July was also a busy month for 1.0 releases at the Foundation. Apache FOP, which has been in development since 1999, is only now reaching this first milestone. The project has long been used by XSL applications as an output-independent formatter for print, despite not being in 1.0 form.
“FOP 1.0 provides a good subset of the W3C XSL-FO 1.0/1.1 specification [an extensible style sheet designed to make XML easier to print],” said Jeremias Märki, member of the Apache XML Graphics Project Management Committee.
“Its stable, 1.0 designation provides added recognition as the productive tool it has been for years. Its redesign and improved features in the layout engine make it an even better experience for the many developers and users who produce millions of pages each year.”
As for CouchDB, Erenkrantz said that this NoSQL isn’t the only such project at Apache to approach 1.0: Cassandra is also progressing. “We welcome competition between our projects as long as there is a sustainable community behind the projects,” he said.
“Ant and Maven happily occupy substantial portions of the Java build ecosystem, and Hive and Pig both represent approaches to data analytics under Hadoop.”
Finally, on July 14, the Foundation released version 2.4 of JMeter. The project can be used to generate test loads, to measure performance and to test functional behavior. Version 2.4 adds the ability to sample HTTPs traffic and JUnit annotations. An additional sampler has been added to scooping up SMTP traffic, and JMS traffic intercepts should no longer lose packets.
