Following the discussion earlier in the thread:
http://s.apache.org/KWE
I would like to call a VOTE for accepting Groovy
as a new incubator project.
The proposal is available at:
https://wiki.apache.org/incubator/GroovyProposal
and is also included at the bottom of this email.
Vote is open until at least Saturday, 21st March 2015, 23:59:00 PST
[ ] +1 accept Groovy in the Incubator
[ ] ±0
[ ] -1 because...
Thanks,
Roman.
== Abstract ==
Groovy is an object-oriented programming language for the Java
platform. It is a language with features similar to those of Python,
Ruby, Java, Perl, and Smalltalk.
Groovy, if accepted by Incubator, will be a first major programming
language developed under the umbrella of Apache Software Foundation.
== Proposal ==
Groovy is a programming language for the Java platform. It is a
primarily dynamic language with features similar to those of Python,
Ruby, Perl, and Smalltalk. It also has optional static type checking
and static compilation facilities. It can be used as a scripting
language for the Java Platform or to write complete applications, is
compiled to Java Virtual Machine (JVM) bytecode, and interoperates
with other Java code and libraries. Groovy uses a Java-like
curly-bracket syntax. Most Java code is also syntactically valid
Groovy, although semantics may be different. Groovy has long been
developed under an Apache License v2.0 under an open governance
community management process. However, so far Groovy has been a
project mostly sponsored by a single company. This proposal aims at
bringing Groovy community under the umbrella of the Apache Software
Foundation.
It must be explicitly noted, that a few sister projects such as Groovy
Eclipse and others (some of them hosted under
https://github.com/groovy and listed at
http://groovy-lang.org/ecosystem.html) are not covered by this
proposal. It is possible that these other projects will be joining ASF
either independently or as sub-projects of Apache Groovy in the
future. For now, we are only proposing groovy-core.
== Background ==
Groovy 1.0 was released on January 2, 2007, and Groovy 2.0 in July,
2012. Groovy 2.5 is planned for release in 2015. Groovy 3.0 is planned
for release in 2016, with support for a new Meta Object Protocol.
Since version 2, Groovy can also be compiled statically, offering type
inference and performance very close to that of Java. Groovy 2.4 will
be the last major release under Pivotal Software's sponsorship, which
is scheduled to end on March 31, 2015.
== Rationale ==
Groovy is a pretty mature language. After 12 years of development, it
has grown from being primarily a dynamic scripting language on the JVM
to an optionally statically compiled language allowing the same
performance level as Java applications. With the release of Groovy
2.4, the language targets the largest pool of mobile developers with
native Android support. Groovy has been integrated in a large number
of applications, including well known open-source projects like
Jenkins, Gradle, ElasticSearch, Spring and more.
There are multiple alternative languages on the JVM: Scala, Clojure,
Ceylon, Kotlin, JRuby, Golo and others but Groovy is the only one
which has proved to be very easy to integrate with Java in both ways:
Groovy code using Java code, but also Java code using Groovy code.
Groovy even provides a joint compiler which allows interdependent Java
and Groovy classes to compile together. Groovy also supports dynamic
code generation, that is to say classes at runtime, making it a
perfect fit for scripting. With a very lightweight and malleable
syntax, it is also easy to build internal Domain Specific Languages
(DSLs) which integrate smoothly within applications.
Groovy provides a number of unique features, like builders (Java 8 has
lambdas but still has syntactic overhead and no notion of delegate),
AST transformations (compile-time metaprogramming) or type checking
extensions (which allows the developer to bring the compiler to levels
of type checking and type inference that go far beyond what other
languages do). Groovy also provides powerful integration options and
customizations which set it apart from other languages. Groovy is also
unique in the way it allows the developer to choose between various
paradigms without compromise: functional vs object-oriented,
statically compiled vs dynamic, scripting vs applications, etc.
Despite all those advantages, and the fact that Groovy is widely
adopted (4.5 million downloads in 2014 for Groovy alone), only a few
Apache projects include Groovy and not a lot of them leverage its full
power. Some developers tend to choose Scala for example to build DSLs
without even knowing that the learning curve is much easier with
Groovy, or that they can leverage powerful type inference in their own
DSLs.
Android development is also a domain where the weight of Java and
old-style APIs is heavy. Groovy 2.4 has proved that Android
development could benefit from its closures, extension methods and
static compilation to build applications which are as fast as Java,
but with code which is much more maintainable and decoupled from
Android APIs. Code generation libraries like SwissKnife illustrate
what Groovy can offer for Android development. However, without
full-time development on this topic, Groovy has a very tough
competition with languages like Kotlin being intensively (and
privately) sponsored to target this platform. With Groovy joining
Apache, we hope that more developers would be able to join the effort
and help reduce the footprint of the language, build libraries that
leverage the full power of Groovy while fostering the long-term future
of the language.
== Initial Goals ==
The initial goals of the Groovy transition under the ASF umbrella are
to establish a new home for an already fully functioning project and
also make sure that the entire development community governs itself in
the "Apache Way".
Please note that a sister project of Groovy -- Grails -- is not part
of this proposal. If Grails community makes a decision to join ASF it
will do so as an independent, albeit related, project.
== Current Status ==
Currently Groovy provides a fully functional implementation licensed
under ALv2. The project home is at http://groovy-lang.org/ and the
majority of development is coordinated via GitHub
https://github.com/groovy. The project sports a very mature
documentation and ecosystem of projects leveraging it. In fact, quite
a few existing ASF project have various plugins or subsystems written
in Groovy (Bigtop, CloudStack, etc.).
=== Meritocracy ===
Groovy, up to this, has been run by a few core project members with a lot of
contributions coming from a wide community of participants in the project.
We want to expand our diverse developer and user community and run the
Groovy project in
the Apache way clearly signaling not only the licensing, but also the
governance choice.
Users and new contributors will be treated with respect and welcomed;
they will earn
merit in the project by providing quality patches and support that
move the project forward.
Those with a proven support and quality patch track record will be
encouraged to become committers.
=== Community ===
There are just a few core team members with over a hundred
contributors to the project. If Groovy is accepted
by the Incubator, transitioning the community to embrace the Apache
Way of governance would be a primary initial goal.
We would solicit major existing contributors to become committers on
the project from the get go.
=== Core Developers ===
Core developers include folks who are extremely skilled in working in the openly
governed communities on code bases license under the ALv2. The core
developers are
NOT currently affiliated with the ASF, although quite a few contributors are.
=== Alignment ===
Groovy has been integrated into Apache Bigtop, Apache CloudStack,
Apache Ofbiz and quite a few other projects.
== Known Risks ==
As noted above, development has been sponsored mostly by a single
company and coordinated
mostly by the core team so far.
For Groovy to fully transition to an "Apache Way" governance model it needs to
start embracing the meritocracy-centric way of growing the community
of contributors
while balancing it with the needs for extreme stability and coherency
of the core
language implementation.
Groovy has historically been hosted at Codehaus. While the project has started
to migrate off the Codehaus infrastructure, some critical tools of the
project are
still hosted there: JIRA, the mailing-list, and the deprecated wiki.
Codehaus has
announced end-of-support for mid-April, making the migration critical.
=== Orphaned products ===
The community proposing Groovy for incubation is a strong and vibrant
open source
project. Even though the sponsorship of the core team by Pivotal is
ending on March 31st,
the sheer size and diversity of the community is a guarantee against
the project being orphaned.
=== Inexperience with Open Source ===
The majority of the proposers here have day jobs that has them working near
full-time on open source projects. A few of us have helped carry
other projects through the Incubator. Groovy to date has been developed as
an open source project.
=== Homogeneous Developers ===
Now that Pivotal is ending its sponsorship, the initial group of committers
is going to be extremely heterogeneous when it comes to corporate affiliations.
The Groovy community is also extremely diverse in terms of geography and
backgrounds of developers.
=== Reliance on Salaried Developers ===
Most of the contributors are paid to work in the Java ecosystem.
While we might wander from our current employers, we probably won’t
go far from the Java family tree.
=== Relationships with Other Apache Products ===
Groovy currently has a few ASF projects as optional dependencies but
otherwise doesn't depend on any ASF projects. A few
ASF projects already depend on Groovy.
=== An Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand ===
While we intend to leverage the Apache ‘branding’ when talking to other
projects as testament of our project’s ‘neutrality’, we have no plans
for making use of Apache brand in press releases nor posting billboards
advertising acceptance of Groovy into Apache Incubator.
== Documentation ==
See [[http://www.groovy-lang.org/documentation.html|documentation]]
for the current state of the Groovy
documentation.
A mature project website is also available at
[[http://www.groovy-lang.org/|groovy-lang.org]].
== Initial Source ==
Initial source is available on GitHub under the ALv2
[[https://github.com/groovy/groovy-core|groovy-core]]
== Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan ==
We know of no legal encumberments in the way of transfer of source to
Apache. In fact, given the
series of corporate due diligence procedures performed on the source
code during two of the
acquisitions we expect the code base to be squeaky clean from an IP perspective.
== External Dependencies ==
Embedded dependencies (relocated):
* Antlr 2, ANTLR 2 License (development branch includes Antlr4
using BSD license)
* ASM, BSD
* Openbeans (ALv2)
* Apache Commons CLI (ALv2)
Module or optional dependencies:
* Apache Ant (ALv2)
* Apache Commons BSF (ALv2)
* Apache Commons Logging (ALv2)
* Apache Ivy (ALv2)
* Apache Log4j (ALv2)
* Apache Log4j 2 (ALv2)
* JAnsi (ALv2)
* JCommander (ALv2)
* JLine 2 (BSD)
* JUnit (EPL 1.0)
* Logback (EPL 1.0)
* QDox (ALv2)
* SLF4J (MIT)
* TestNG (ALv2)
Build only dependencies:
* bnd (ALv2)
* jarjar (ALv2)
* Checkstyle (LGPL)
* Cobertura (GPL)
* Gradle (ALv2)
* Asciidoctor (MIT)
* Simian (http://www.harukizaemon.com/simian/get_it_now.html)
Test only dependencies:
* Apache Commons HTTP Client (ALv2)
* Apache Lucene (ALv2)
* Eclipse OSGi (EPL 1.0)
* GPars (ALv2)
* HSQLDB (BSD)
* JMock (jMock Project License)
* OpenEJB (ALv2)
* Spock (ALv2)
* XMLUnit 1 (BSD)
* XStream (BSD)
Cryptography
N/A
== Required Resources ==
=== Mailing lists ===
* priv...@groovy.incubator.apache.org (moderated subscriptions)
* comm...@groovy.incubator.apache.org
* d...@groovy.incubator.apache.org
* iss...@groovy.incubator.apache.org
* u...@groovy.incubator.apache.org
=== Git Repository ===
https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-groovy.git
=== Issue Tracking ===
JIRA Groovy (GROOVY)
=== Other Resources ===
A build server is currently sponsored by Jetbrains (TeamCity):
http://ci.groovy-lang.org?guest=1
The CI server has a number of build plans including multiple JDKs (5
to 9), 3rd party joint builds and integration with the Groovy website
(automatic deployment upon push).
Means of setting up regular builds for Groovy on builds.apache.org
== Initial Committers ==
* Cédric Champeau
* Guillaume Laforge
* Jochen Theodorou
* Paul King
* Pascal Schumacher
== Affiliations ==
* Pivotal: Cédric Champeau, Jochen Theodorou
* Restlet: Guillaume Laforge
* ASERT: Paul King
* Pascal Schumacher
== Sponsors ==
=== Champion ===
Roman Shaposhnik
=== Nominated Mentors ===
* Bertrand Delacretaz - Apache Member
* Emmanuel Lecharny - Apache Member
* Jim Jagielski - Apache Member
* Roman Shaposhnik - Apache Member
* Andrew Bayer - Apache Member
* Konstantin Boudnik - IPMC Member
Six mentors is plenty, we are not looking for more mentors at this time.
=== Sponsoring Entity ===
We would like to propose Apache incubator to sponsor this project.
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