As submitted: ## Description: The mission of Apache Daffodil is the creation and maintenance of software related to an implementation of the Data Format Description Language (DFDL) used to convert between fixed format data and more readily processed forms such as XML or JSON
## Project Status: Current project status: Ongoing. Moderate activity. Issues for the board: None. ## Membership Data: Apache Daffodil was founded 2021-02-16 (4 years ago) There are currently 19 committers and 18 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 1:1. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Peter Katlic on 2024-03-17. - No new committers. Last addition was Peter Katlic on 2024-03-17. ## Project Activity: The past 6 to 8 months, the project has mostly been dealing with the evolution of our underlying Scala platform. Porting from Scala 2.12 to Scala 2.13 was quite challenging, as much of the Scala built-in XML support that we were strongly dependent on, was removed in Scala 2.13. The subsequent port to Scala 3 required significant changes that will impact all API-level Daffodil users. Daffodil 3.11.0 was released on 2025-06-17 along with the matching Daffodil SBT plugin 1.4.0. This is the last release using Scala 2 technology, specifically the LTS Scala 2.13 version. If necessary we can support this longer term as needed for Daffodil library users who have fielded products using our Scala 2 code base who are unable to upgrade (more on this below) to the forthcoming Daffodil 4.0.0 any time soon. The Daffodil VSCode Extension 1.4.1 was released on 2025-06-30. The current project activity includes better overall error handling, improved reliability of Data Editor, Optimize and enhance the DFDL Schema syntax and semantic support tools (e.g., Intellisense) to support Namespace-aware element suggestions, several bug-fixes and enhancements to TDML functionality. Daffodil 4.0.0 is in preparation. This major release uses Scala 3 technology, and includes an entirely new and improved API necessitated by Scala-Java interoperability changes in Scala 3. The Daffodil API no longer has a Java/Scala dual API. It is defined entirely in Java. In addition to this major API discontinuity, we have chosen to fix issues that would also require a major version change - some non-conformities to the DFDL specification are fixed, for example. This release requires our users to adapt to the new API, but also to re-test all their DFDL schemas for sensitivities to the DFDL language changes where they might have been depending on prior non-DFDL-language conforming behavior. For example we know of users with 300+ DFDL Schemas in their company DFDL schema library. Few will be sensitive to the DFDL language behavior changes, as they are in somewhat obscure aspects of the DFDL language, but testing on the DFDL schemas available to us did show a few schemas were incompatible and need updates for Daffodil 4.0.0. Ultimately Daffodil 4.0.0 is clearly better than the prior versions and the API is more supportable, but the vast bulk of the required changes added no value for our users, who may wait for more value-add in subsequent releases before going through the upgrade pain. ## Community Health: Good activity level in developer email and commit activity. User list activity is low. But regardless of this, it has been reported to us that 14 corporations have embedded Daffodil in their products. Since they are in the cybersecurity space, they don't participate in open-source forums nor can we identify most of them here. One is the Broadcom Layer 7 API Gateway, and a web search for that plus "DFDL" will find content about it. Based on this we expect we have a reasonable user count despite the low level of forum activity.
