Apache Harmony Board Report, December 2006
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Issues requiring the Board's attention: none.
Infrastructure
--------------
We have now completed our second full month of TLP, and with the recent
creation of our Solaris Zone, we have no outstanding infrastructure
requests, and thank the ASF infrastructure team for helping us with our
transition from the Incubator. We plan on adding a few new mail lists,
one for our community-distributed build/test system alerts, and
eventually one for users.
Development
-----------
The project continues to make progress towards it's primary goal of a
complete implementation of Java SE 5. We have over 96% of the Java SE 5
class library complete, and the virtual machine continues to make
substantial progress. We look forward to securing the JCK for Java SE 6
to start integrating it into our build/test frameworks as to immediately
begin testing the portions of the classlibrary that we believe are spec
complete.
While I can't quantify the VM as I can the class library in terms of
measurable completeness, it's clear we're making good progress due to
the continued improvements in stability, functionality and performance.
We also have quite a bit of progress in the area of documentation and
website, with a committed set of community members focused on that.
In the last month we completed substantial work on our "JDK tools" part
of the project, which is the code and build infrastructure for the
additional programs that come with the runtime environment in the "Java
Development Kit" (aka JDK). As of now, we have a JDK that has "java"
(the runtime), "javac" (the Java language to bytecode compiler, based on
the Eclipse ECJ compiler), "javah" (C header and stub file generator),
and "keytool" (used for manipulating keys and certificates), and will
continue to work to complete the full toolchain.
Security
--------
Mid November, a user identified a potential vulnerability in the
codebase pertaining to a thread being able to mine values owned by other
threads in the so-called "ThreadLocal" storage. This was
identified on the private@ list, and after the PMC determined that there
was no real need continued discussion in secrecy, we moved the
discussion to the public list and resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
Community
---------
On the community front, things are fairly static. We are seeing a small
drop in our dev list participation numbers, but there are no known
reasons why, other than seasonal variability.
In late November, Sun announced the creation of their open source Java
project called "OpenJDK". They will be releasing over the next 6 months
the source code to Java SE 6, under the GPLv2 and GPLv2+Classpath
Exception licenses. As of now, they have released their "javac"
Java-language-to-bytecode compiler and their VM to the community under
the GPLv2 license. Currently, they are still working out the details
regarding their community structure. We expect that this action will
have at least a short term affect on our community, simply because it's
a more advanced codebase, and an alternative community for people to
participate in. Overall, though, this is a positive thing for the open
source Java ecosystem, and we'll continue to look for ways to bridge the
two communities.
One final community note - the Apache Gump project has been working
towards using Harmony as a "base" for their activities, and with the
recent completion of the "javac" compiler in Harmony, we're hoping that
we'll soon start seeing full Gump runs on the Harmony JDK.
On behalf of the Apache Harmony Project,
geir
