Here's the July 2007 board report for the Apache MINA project. (http://mina.apache.org) I apologize for the delayed report; I missed the first notification message by mistake. Because there's nothing confidential in this report and it contains a lot of useful information for users, I will CC our public mailing list, too. Also, please let us know if we are missing some important point, which will help us create the road map.
Releases ======== We cut six new minor releases: 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.0.6, 1.1.1, 1.1.2 and 1.1.3. The new releases contain backward-compatible minor improvements and several bug fixes. We didn't announce the news for 1.0.6 and 1.1.3, but it's on the way. Community ========= Mike Heath, long time MINA committer, has shown his continuing contribution to the project, and has been promoted to be a PMC member. Maarten Bosteels, another long time community member and document contributor, has been added to our committer list. Niclas Hedman, the mentor of the FTPServer project in the Incubator, asked about the possibility of hosting the FTPServer project under MINA project. All PMC members expressed positive opinion, so we are going to start a vote for adopting the FTPServer project. As the MINA core itself becomes more and more mature, people started to ask about out-of-the-box protocol codecs for well-known protocols such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP and ISO 8583 which will potentially boost up server development in an order of magnitude. We agreed that AsyncWeb (received software grant), FTPServer (under incubation) and ISO 8583 (need to contact the existing community) are going to be a great addition to the project. Jeff Genender, the Geronimo committer and member, also donated HTTP client module for MINA. Of course, all these additions should occur in the manageable extent, and we believe we can. Due to the massive class renaming and refactoring, we are getting many questions about disappeared classes recently. It means much more people than we expected are using the development branch, and it can possibly lead to complaints of the users. Releasing 2.0.0-M1, the first milestone of the next generation of MINA, as soon as possible will remedy situation. Due to the high flexibility and generic API, users often find themselves difficulty in choosing the right way to implement a protocol codec. We need to improve documentation on this area to reduce the ratio of the questions in the mailing list. Our web site has been revamped to attractive more people. We also added a link to Nabble.com mailing list archive for those who are not used to the mailing list. Features ======== Julien Vermillard, our most active committer and PMC member, added preliminary support for APR transport. This means MINA now can utilize ASF's high-performance and cross-platform library for network operations. All the existing MINA applications will benefit from this thanks to the highly abstract nature of MINA API. Trustin Lee refactored the trunk massively to make implementing a new transport very easily. Julien's APR transport will be the first customer of this change. Thanks to this change, a lot of code duplication has been removed. Maarten Bosteels added MDC injection filter that helps to create more understandable communication logs. A brand new asynchronous HTTP client was contributed by Jeff Genender and integrated into MINA codebase by Mark Webb Issues ====== As OSGi framework becomes a buzzword in the market, people keeps asking about providing OSGi bundles for MINA artifacts. We've been relying on the Maven 2 plugin provided by the Felix project, but we dropped the support because it doesn't work pretty well with multi-project layout. We temporarilly concluded to wait for the plugin to fix the bug. Logging framework, again, arose as an issue. Users seem to have difficulties configuring SLF4J, so we added a dedicated page for configuring SLF4J for MINA in our documentation section. Most PMC members agreed on moving Niklas's state machine module to the trunk. Strictly speaking, it doesn't depend on MINA core, but it is very clear that it is designed to work very well with MINA and protocol implementation. Cheers, Trustin -- what we call human nature is actually human habit -- http://gleamynode.net/ -- PGP Key ID: 0x0255ECA6
