I came into my office today to go through the accumulation of stuff
from this year and prepare for next year. I guess it is inevitable
but one generally tends to be a bit contemplative around this time of
year. Thinking about accomplishments, missed opportunities and the
goals for next year and how much weight you gained and want to lose :)
2007 was a huge year for apache Geronimo. Looking back to 2003 when
the project was formed till now has seen a lot of change. The project
has seen people come and go, new twists on the server and expanding
relationships with other projects. Here are a few highlights (in no
particular order):
Certified Apache Geronimo 2.0-M6 as a certified Java Enterprise
Edition 5.0 container. (have to pause for a second on that one)
Wow, everyone pulled together to do surgery on Geronimo and at the
same time pull together code from other projects to make EE 5.0 a
reality. Here is a quick list of other Apache Projects we pulled in
(forgive me for the ones I miss) MyFaces, Tomcat, OpenJPA, CXF, Axis2,
Commons shtuffes, OpenEJB, ActiveMQ, Yoko and some others as well as
non-apache projects whose help is very appreciated like Jetty. In
some cases I saw Geronimo committers get involved in other projects to
help them with their certification efforts as well. It was a tribute
to the Apache Way how people pulled together to make this happen.
There were so many contributions from folks it seems unfair to name
names.
However, I'd like to recognize Dain for his significant contributions
in Geronimo, OpenEJB, as well as his involvement in OpenJPA to pull
all of this together to deliver a solution for EE 5.0. Even though 1.2
never saw a release almost all of the code in that release defined new
infrastructure for 2.0 and you can see it today in 2.0.x.
Also I'd be remiss in not recognizing the OpenEJB / Geronimo folks
like Blevins for leading by example in getting a whole new EJB
container written. As well as Jacek for his continued faithful
involvement across projects and for causing me to scour the web for
Polish phrases.
Dillon gets a mention for his whining and complaining at the rest of
us and cleaning up our dog droppings around the build stuff. Without
Jason I know we wouldn't have made it sure we'd be where we are
today. Dillon even help automate some of our legal muck because of
Kevan's constant whining. Speaking about Kevan ...
Kevan (or shall I say Miller, Miller and Miller at Law) for his
incessant pestering us for NOTICE file this and LICENSE file that. It
seems to me that we probably have one of the best release processes /
legal coverage of any Apache project (of course I'm merely
speculating :) Apart from that Kevan did a huge amount of TCK work
and debugged a bunch of memory leaks.
Talking about TCK I think Joe Bohn's eyes are bloodshot from running,
monitoring and managing the TCK bits during our certification
process. I know from personal knowledge that Joe was busy as the
servers he used sit in my basement. Joe singlehandedly drove my
electric bill up and also increased the temperature in my basement by
at least 10 degrees. Thanks Joe.
Gianny has been very active in terms of adding clustering
functionality on to the server and I don't know how he manages to find
the time to get this large set of work done; a magician by any measure.
Anita continued to move us forward in terms of improving the
monitoring story in G as she worked and mentored a few folks into the
Geronimo fold. I'm not sure how she juggles family life and stays
connected to Geronimo but I know we'd be hurting without her. If
memory serves me correctly she also did some work on fixing up the
server to support multiple instances in a single file system.
Genender was a busy beaver this year working on Web Services around
certification and spent a lot of time with the CXF folks. I think he
also added a new feature around Async HTTP stuff which is a neat
feature G has that others don't. He also worked on a plugin for
Terracotta and other stuff. How he continues to work while enjoying
the view from his living room in Colorado I'll never know.
Jarek was another WebServices guy who did a lot of work with Axis and
CXF and helped mentor new folks in like Lin Sun. Jarek is like a
bulldozer in ploughing through the muck and making beautiful things
happen. Thanks bubba.
Dims spent lots of time on the Geronimo side from Axis and working
with the team to get the WebServices pieces going. I know its hard to
wear multiple hats and Dims wore them well.
Of course, who could forget Jencks. David seemed to work on
everything, get it completed and made the impossible seem possible.
He's one of the few folks I know that is deep across a broad set of
technologies; and humble to boot.
Donald Woods for discovering the security flaw before we released 2.0
(I'm still not sure if I am happy about that :-). Donald is a
faithful follower of JIRAs and keeps us from falling behind.
Lin Sun joined us as a commiter this year (as did others) and worked a
lot on the WebServices pieces.
Mr McHugh joined us as well and has been helpful to the team around
EJB development and especially helpful to users.
Prasad has continued his involvement by adding test cases and support
around Geronimo. Always happy to help others and a great resource for
Maven help.
McGuire continues to amaze me with his ORB prowess and general
flexibility in EJB, core server, and other stuff.
Erik and Viet have been cranking on some cool new monitoring stuff
based on DOJO and gives people a better view into what is happening in
Geronimo.
McConnell did a lot of work on annotations and on the Eclipse Plugin.
Vamsi has been active on the user list and working on security related
stuff as well.
Paul McMahan has been busy carving up the console and has a cool new
framework for making console plugins available. He also did some work
with the MyFaces guys to help them get certified.
Apart from the people listed above (I know I've forgotten someone I
just don't know who ;-0 ) we have lots of folks that use Geronimo,
provide patches and give lots of good feedback. Even on the items
listed above, there is not one person who did all the work but it was
the collection of the individuals that produce a single server that
our users can build their applications on.
2007 was a significant year for Geronimo...we pulled out from behind
other AppServer vendors and projects with a certified release. We're
ahead of the game. That said, there are lots of opportunity for
innovation in 2008 and I can't wait to see where we end up.
Here is congratulating everyone on a great year. Wishing you an
excellent holiday and looking forward to what comes next.
Matt
