February 2008 Board Report
==========================
Since our last report in November the Roller project has been making
progress on two fronts: Roller 4.0 and Roller 4.1. Community is healthy,
though we have seen some slow-down in mailing list activity. Here are
the details.
Apache Roller 4.0 released!
Roller 4.0 is a major new release that upgrades Roller to Jave SE 5,
Struts 2, Velocity 1.5 and OpenJPA. It's the first release that does not
require Hibernate or any other LGPL code to run. It was released on
December 5, 2007 and announced on the Roller mailing lists and the
project blog.
We've made enough bug fixes in the Roller 4.0 branch that it's probably
time to start thinking about a bug 4.0.1 bug fix release. Here's the
list of issues fixed for 4.0.1
Roller 4.1 development, now in trunk
Roller 4.1 development is underway and since the Roller 4.0 release, we
have merged the work into the trunk. The proposal to externalize user
management has been implemented, as has the proposal to add a Tag Data
API so other apps can get Roller's tag cloud data.
See also Proposal Roller 4.1 Release
See also list of issues resolved for 4.1
Apache Roller 3.1 completed, 3.1.1 RC6 ready for testing
No change in 3.1.1 status since last report. We still have not gotten
votes for release.
We shipped 3.1 on April 23, 2007. A number of significant problems
(including an XSS bug) were found and fixed. We are now testing a fix
release known as 3.1.1 RC6, made available October 4, 2007 (announcement
here: http://tinyurl.com/ynmrtj).
Some post graduation work still TBD
No change in status. JIRA is still hosted externally.
Apache Roller graduated back in March and announced graduation and the
Apache Roller 3.1 release on April 23, 2007. However, we've still got
some work to do. We're still waiting for our JIRA instance to be setup
(see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-813).
Community health
Community health is good, but activity has slowed a little during Fall
of 2007. Developers and users are active on the mailing lists, reporting
bugs, submitting patches and seeking support. A talk on Advanced Apache
Roller has been accepted for ApacheCon EU 2008.
See also Roller mail list stats
See also Roller web and download stats
May 2008 Board Report
=====================
Since our last report in February the Roller project has been making
slow progress on two fronts: Roller 4.0 and Roller 4.1, mostly in the
form of testing and bug fixes. Community is healthy, though we have seen
some slow-down in mailing list activity. Here are the details.
Roller 4.1 development, now in trunk
Roller 4.1 development is underway and since the Roller 4.0 release, we
have merged the work into the trunk. The proposal to externalize user
management has been implemented, as has the proposal to add a Tag Data
API so other apps can get Roller's tag cloud data.
See also Proposal Roller 4.1 Release
See also list of issues resolved for 4.1
Apache Roller 3.1 completed, 3.1.1 RC6 ready for testing
No change in 3.1.1 status since last report. We still have not gotten
votes for release.
We shipped 3.1 on April 23, 2007. A number of significant problems
(including an XSS bug) were found and fixed. We are now testing a fix
release known as 3.1.1 RC6, made available October 4, 2007 (announcement
here: http://tinyurl.com/ynmrtj).
Community health
Community health is good, but activity has slowed a little since Fall of
2007. Developers and users are active on the mailing lists, reporting
bugs, submitting patches and seeking support. An all-new talk on
Advanced Apache Roller was given ApacheCon EU 2008 and was submitted for
ApacheCon US 2008.
See also Roller mail list stats
See also Roller web and download stats
Other matters
Review of encryption technologies is underway. At this point it appears
that our only usage of encryption is for password authentication,
provided by Spring Acegi and Commons Codec.
August 2008 Board Report
========================
This is my quarterly board report for August 2008. It covers community
health, status of our most recent release, work that has been done in
the trunk and plans for new work.
Community health
Development activity still slow due to committers working on other
projects and the fact that Roller 4.0 is stable and works well as is.
User support questions are coming in at a steady clip and the mailing
list is responding to them adequately.
Activity begets activity and vice versa
Lack of activity is a problem for the community, because it makes the
project appear to be stagnant and that discourages new users, which
reduces the pool of new community members. So, I will briefly discuss
why we have lack of activity and ways we can address the issue.
One reason for the lack of activity is that two high-profile projects
that use Roller (and employ or employed committers) are now operating on
forks of the code base and the committers have stopped contributing back
to Roller. Why did they fork? I believe this is due to the instability
that was caused by our Apache policy required move away from
Hibernate/LGPL and move to OpenJPA. Those two high-profile projects are
still not using our new implementation and perhaps cannot justify the
time required to get back in sync with main-line Roller development.
Ways to get active
How can we get some activity going again? Here are some ideas:
Make Roller more pluggable so that new features can be added without
de-stabilizing the core of Roller.
Make it easier to contribute with better guidelines for new developers
and less emphasis on proposal; patches should be preferred over proposals.
Learn a lesson from GSoC. Define some projects that we want to have
developed, advertise our need for help on the projects and be prepared
to mentor volunteers.
Wrap up bug fixes and release Apache Roller 4.0.1
Status of Apache Roller 4.0
Roller 4.0 is the best available release of Roller. We have made enough
bug fixes in the 4.0 code base to justify a 4.0.1 release, users have
tested snapshot builds and we should wrap things up and make a final
4.0.1 release as soon as possible.
Status of work in the trunk
Here's some of the work we've done since 4.0 was release. The user
management work is probably significant enough to justify calling the
next release 5.0. We need to decide whether to push a new release out
soon as is, or later with better plugin support.
We added a new fully pluggable user management system and better support
for contributed by Dave Johnson working on Sun's social software for
Glassfish efforts.
Our Google Summer of Code student has completed OpenID support, using
Spring Security to do. We are currently evaluating the final patch.
Dave Johnson started working on upgrading from OpenJPA 0.9.7 to OpenJPA
1.0 but ran in to problems and has committed none of this work.
Allen Gilliland contributed his most recent code for Apache Roller
Planet, from his work on planets.sun.com. This is a separate application
from the Apache Roller Weblogger and has not yet been released.
Plans for new work in the trunk
Two students have signed up, as part of the Glassfish community outreach
programs, and applied to work on a project I proposed called Media
Blogging for Roller to improve support for file uploads and blogging
about uploaded pictures, audio and video files. Expect to see them on
the mailing lists before the end of August.
Promoting the project
My talk was rejected at ApacheCon US, but will be speaking at Open
Source Days on the topic of The Once and Future Roller, where I'll tell
the story of Roller and my thoughts on the intersection of
Roller/blogging and social networking.
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November 2008 Board Report
==========================
This is Roller's quarterly board report for November 2008. It covers
community health, status of our most recent release, work that has been
done in the trunk and plans for new work.
Status of work in the trunk
(Unchanged since last report) Here's some of the work we've done since
4.0 was release. The user management work is probably significant enough
to justify calling the next release 5.0. We need to decide whether to
push a new release out soon as is, or later with better plugin support.
We added a new fully pluggable user management system and better support
for contributed by Dave Johnson working on Sun's social software for
Glassfish efforts.
Our Google Summer of Code student has completed OpenID support, using
Spring Security to do. We are currently evaluating the final patch.
Dave Johnson started working on upgrading from OpenJPA 0.9.7 to OpenJPA
1.0 but ran in to problems and has committed none of this work.
Allen Gilliland contributed his most recent code for Apache Roller
Planet, from his work on planets.sun.com. This is a separate application
from the Apache Roller Weblogger and has not yet been released.
Plans for new work in the trunk
Two San Jose State University students, Ganesh Mathrubootham and Tanuja
Varkanthe, are working on a two-semester project to improve Roller's
Media Blogging features. This includes better management of media files
images, video and audio files, new user interfaces for browsing and
selecting media files and more. They've been doing extensive work on the
Roller wiki to create a proposal and detailed design for this work,
which you can find here: Proposal Media Blogging Support. Just last week
we created a branch for the development of these new features, which
will eventually (we hope) find their way in to the trunk.
Status of Apache Roller 4.0
(Unchanged since last report) Roller 4.0 is the best available release
of Roller. We have made enough bug fixes in the 4.0 code base to justify
a 4.0.1 release, users have tested snapshot builds and we should wrap
things up and make a final 4.0.1 release as soon as possible.
Community health
(Unchanged since last report) Development activity still relatively slow
due to committers working on other projects and the fact that Roller 4.0
is stable and works well as is. User support questions are coming in at
a steady clip and the mailing list is responding to them adequately.
Promoting the project
Dave Johnson spoke on the topic of Roller at the Open Source Days
conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on October 4, 2008. He covered this
history of the project, current status and his thoughts about the future
of the project.
