status

2003-11-11

We have recieved a mail a letter on behalf of the JBoss Group, LCC dated October 31, 2003that asks for clarifiations regarding similarity between parts of the Geronimo codebase and the JBoss codebase.

We are thus in the process of actively reviewing not only the specific claims but also the code base in general.

A small info page for Geronimo can be found here.

The wiki for Geronimo is at http://wiki.apache.org/geronimo/

-DONE- Make sure that the requested project name does not already exist and check www.nameprotect.com to be sure that the name is not already trademarked for an existing software product.

-DONE- If request from an existing Apache project to adopt an external package, then ask the Apache project for the cvs module and mail address names.

-DONE- If request from outside Apache to enter an existing Apache project, then post a message to that project for them to decide on acceptance.

-DONE- If request from anywhere to become a stand-alone PMC, then assess the fit with the ASF, and create the lists and modules under the incubator address/module names if accepted.

-DONE- Who has been identified as the Mentor for the incubation?

Geir Magnusson Jr. Jim Jagielski

• Are they tracking progress in the file

incubator/projects/{project_name}/status

-DONE- Have the papers that transfer rights to the ASF been received? It is only necessary to transfer rights for the package, the core code, and any new code produced by the project.

(new codebase)

• Have the files been updated to reflect the new ASF copyright?

Verify distribution rights:

• For all code included with the distribution that is not under the

Apache license, do we have the right to combine with Apache-licensed code and redistribute?

-DONE- Is all source code distributed by the project covered by one or more of the following approved licenses: Apache, BSD, Artistic, MIT/X, MIT/W3C, MPL 1.1, or something with essentially the same terms?

• Check all clarification requests from the JBoss group, and in

particular check that this letter dated 2003-10-31 has been properly addressed.

• Are all active committers in the STATUS file?
• Do they have accounts on cvs.apache.org?
• Have they submitted a contributors agreement?

• CVS modules created and committers added to avail file?
• Mailing lists set up and archived?
• Problem tracking system (Bugzilla)?
• Has the project migrated to our infrastructure?

• Have all of the active long-term volunteers been identified

and acknowledged as committers on the project?

-DONE- Are there three or more independent committers?

(The legal definition of independent is long and boring, but basically it means that there is no binding relationship between the individuals, such as a shared employer, that is capable of overriding their free will as individuals, directly or indirectly.)

-DONE- Are project decisions being made in public by the committers?

• Are the decision-making guidelines published and agreed to by all of the committers?

• If graduating to an existing PMC, has the PMC voted to accept it?

• If graduating to a new PMC, has the board voted to accept it?

• Has the Incubator decided that the project has accomplished all

of the above tasks?

From dain@coredevelopers.net Mon Sep  8 08:06:42 2003
Mailing-List: contact geronimo-dev-help@incubator.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Reply-To: geronimo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Delivered-To: mailing list geronimo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Date: Sat, 6 Sep 2003 16:11:25 -0500
Subject: State of the Project
From: Dain Sundstrom <dain@coredevelopers.net>
To: geronimo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Message-Id: <AC8D58FA-E0AE-11D7-B8F0-000393DB559A@coredevelopers.net>

The first month of our project has seen a deluge of volunteers, email
and code.  Indeed, for the first few days we had so many volunteers
that it was almost impossible to keep up with the influx.  Many of the
initial volunteers stuck around and are actively participating.  The
email volume of the last month is shocking.  We have had over three
thousand messages on the list, and for the first few days we were
getting hundreds of emails a day.  The volume has settled down to a
much more manageable level, and the discussions have improved as a
result.  It has been amazing to see the small code seed we started with
grow into a two and a half megabyte source bundle.  Even with this
massive growth, the code base has remained stable (the build has only
been broken a few times).

Given these signs, we declare the state of the project to be healthy
and vibrant.

The momentum of the project is huge, and it appears we have reached the
critical mass required for a success. However, we have some challenges
to overcome.  One of these is the nature of discussions on the mailing
list - we have had many bike shed type discussions thrashing minute
details to death but choking out larger topics.  In some cases, this
has resulted in contributors collaborating offline and major changes
happening with little public discussion.  This issue is gradually
working itself out, but we all need to be aware of this tendency and
work to keep discussions on the list more focused.

Another challenge facing us is how to grow the committer base.  There
is some perception of a cathedral clique of insiders, whereas in
reality, many of the project management issues have arisen because the
current committers are not used to working together and are new to the
Apache Way.  With the initial startup phase behind us, we will be
looking to expand the project rapidly over the next couple of months.



Geronimo is a complex project with many collaborating subsystems and
significant progress has been made in many areas.

BUILD SYSTEM
Our build system came together surprisingly quickly.  We have support
for multiple modules and an amazing auto-generated web site from maven.
  Jason Dillon is currently working out the structure of our final
build, and Dain Sundstrom and David Blevins will be setting up an
integration testing system next week.

SPECIFICATION APIs
Some of the least exciting but most critical work has been the
provision of unencumbered versions of the specification APIs. Credit
goes to Maas van den Berg and Aaron Mulder for much of this work, with
a special mention of Alex Blewitt for diligently building out the
JavaMail API which contains substantial concrete implementation.

SERVICE FOUNDATION
Using JMX as a kernel technology has facilitated the manageability of
the system.  A GeronimoMBean has been added, intended to be the basis
for other services in Geronimo.  This MBean provides support for
multiple managed objects and implements the managed object, state
manageable and event provider interfaces from the J2EE Management
specification.  Dain Sundstrom will be adding persistence capability,
allowing the server configuration to be preserved between restarts.

CONSOLE
A console subsystem is in progress with web and command-line based
interfaces under development by N. Alex Rupp and Matt Kurjanowicz.
There are also plans for a GUI console once a common structure has been
determined.

DEPLOYMENT
A common deployment architecture has been defined, supporting local and
remote modules, dependencies between deployed components, and pluggable
deployment strategies. Currently deployment is provided for service
archives containing MBeans; support will be added soon for Web, EJB and
Connector modules. Scanners have been implemented for both local and
remote (WebDAV) filesystems.

REMOTING
Hiram Chirino has implemented a remoting framework for routing
invocation requests both within and between VMs, freeing containers
from the need to handle wire protocols and failover.  The current code
supports both synchronous and asynchronous communication and is built
on NIO.  Future work will add IIOP support using the simple RMI/IIOP
ORB, allowing us to meet the requirements of the J2EE specification.

METADATA
We have defined a format for Geronimo-specific deployment descriptors
and have added a basic object model for representing them in memory. A
simple loader is in place based on Xerces and DOM, and investigation is
proceeding into more effective XML binding based on the XMLBeans
project. Aaron Mulder has been responsible for much of the initial
implementation, and he is continuing work on J2EE Deployment (JSR 88)
and Validation.

CLIENT CONTAINER
Jeremy Boynes has implemented an Application Client Container as a
starting point for enterprise container functionality.  This includes a
simple implementation of the java:comp Environment Naming Context with
support for env-entry and ejb-ref elements.  Basic interoperability
with external J2EE servers has been tested and full support will come
with the introduction of IIOP remoting.

SECURITY
A start has been made on security by David Blevins and Alan Cabrera in
the form of a JACC (JSR 115) implementation which, combined with JAAS,
will provide a pluggable authentication and authorization framework.


With many of the basic services now in place, we expect to start work
soon on the EJB containers and hopefully will have Session and BMP
Entity support available within the next month.

In other areas, co-ordination has started with the OpenJMS and LDAPd
projects to facilitate the integration of technology, and discussion
has started with ObjectWeb to allow the sharing of technology between
the two projects.

This has been a phenomenal first month in which huge progress has been
made. Much of the technical groundwork has now been laid and we can
look forward to the challenges of the EJB and Connector subsystems.

The Geronimo Project