I have the urge to code on something new. It’s been there for a while and will probably continue to be there for a while given that work, recurring flu/virus, kids (birthday season) and new home work continue to be my life. Still. Decided to give myself a half an hour to look at the Incubator when I should be doing FHA claims.
The projects can be found at incubator.apache.org.
Abdera - 2 year+ Atom parser. This would be tempting if it was new, but I suspect there’s not that much going on. I’ve used this as a developer - seem to recall it fell over because I was shoving junk noise in from the Apache mailing list archives. Wonder when they’ll leave the Incubator - I see that 0.5.0 is being discussed.
Bluesky is an e-learning system for rural China. Technically, not that interesting. I don’t have great C/Linux skills, but people-wise it is interesting. It’s Apache’s first project where the core community are from outside the traditional open source world of Europe and N.America. Bit worrying that the documentation link hasn’t been setup yet, and no archive links. One test mail to the user list in June, 334 mails to the dev list. So put this one on the ‘have a bit of a deeper read’.
Buildr - Build system for Java in Ruby. I love build systems, so one for the ‘have a deeper read’, but not something I want to get involved in.
Click - not needing another web framework.
Composer - DOA. Needs removing from the project list.
CouchDB - Erlang == cool, but I’m not looking to be a DB guy.
Empire-db - Sounds like DdlUtils; I suspect I’m not understanding this one.
Etch - Seems to be a network programming model of some sort. Seems interesting; a month in the Incubator and no site yet. This can go on the maybe list.
Hama - Parallel matrix computation package built on Hadoop. Two pluses - Hadoop and math. One negative - math. I’m a maths guy who didn’t do enough numerical analysis. Another maybe.
Imperius - Generalization of CIM-SPL. Erm. Language for management policies using condition-action rules. Erm. I guess this needs to go on the maybe just so I don’t look so stupid again.
JSecurity - Java + Security. Woo. There since May, no website. Can’t be arsed.
JSPWiki - My favourite wiki, but not the new thing I’m looking for.
Log4php - Erm no. In fact, I don’t see any life on this again. This needs to be shutdown and kicked out of the Incubator. DOA x 2.
Lokahi - I like this, and hope none of the guys who work on it were hit by the Merck layoffs that I heard about on the news. It’s the kind of thing that you need to need to use to get involved with.
Lucene.Net - Nope.
NMaven - Again nope.
Olio - AppFuse for AJAX. Nope.
PDFBox - Interesting one (Java PDF library); spec so somewhat bound, but complex enough to involved a good amount of work. On the maybe, perhaps list.
PhotArk - no date as to when it entered incubation. Photo gallery is right up my interest area right now, but implementing in Java is insanely stupid, at least for my use case. I want a photo gallery I can run, not one that I can run a company on. Sounds like this is the latter.
Qpid - AMQP implementation; not interested.
RAT - Release Audit Tool. Technically I’m a committer on this as I was outside of Apache. No huge urge to dive into this though.
RCF - JSF library *shuffles away*
River - Jini implementation; cool but not doing it for me right now.
Sanselan - Pure Java image library. Somewhat interesting as with PDFBox in that it’s very bound. It’s also a part of Java that makes me have to think because I’ve so rarely done it - low level byte manipulation. Tempting.
Shindig - The next Hadoop? (thus earning a complimentary beer from Brian). Really ought to dig into this one, so one for the maybe list.
Sling - also somewhat interesting. JCR with OSGi to do web framework. Need to read up on.
Thrift - quite interesting; Corba for the Web 2.0 generation. Maybe I should write a Rebol plugin.
Tika - quite generic sounding. Toolkit for parsing content out of documents, somehow, somewhere.
UIMA - quite similar to the previous in terms of parsing data out of unstructured wossname.
VCL - something about virtual machine images and hypervisor - skip.
WSRP4J - WS, portals, no great interest.
XAP - XML view language for use instead of JavaScript. Not very interested.
So at the end of the day I get a list of Abdera, Buildr, Etch, Hama, Sanselan, Shindig, Sling, and Thrift.
