[DRAFT2] Jakarta Newsletter - January 2003

[Robert Oxspring]

Jakarta Newsletter
==================
Issue: 7
Date: January 2003
Url: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/news/200301.html

The month has been quite busy for apache folks, with new apache projects, new jakarta subprojects and talk of even more. And to reassure you that the code is also coming along nicely, at least Lucene, Ant and HttpClient are expecting releases in the near future.

As always, I want to thank those who contributed and hope that you enjoy the read. If you would like to comment further on any of the highlighted discussions then please do so on the appropriate list, if you want to comment on the newsletter itself then please point your comments to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Rob Oxspring


Contents
--------
# General
# Commons
# db.apache.org
# Lucene
# POI


General
=======
" Ideas, suggestions, and comments on the overall Jakarta project "
Editor: Rob Oxspring

Robert Simmons kicked of a debate over the use of forum software to make it easier for users to get involved with jakarta subprojects [1,2]. The Jakarta developers seemed united in preferring mailing lists and pointed out archives [3] and services such as gmane [4] for more casual use of the lists.

The Pluto subproject was proposed as a reference implementation of the Portlet API and was heavily discussed [5]. Relating to the portals theme, Charon was propsed ro implement the Web Services for Remote specification, although this recieved only a little discussion [6,7].

Dani Estermann asked for some advice on choosing a logging stratergy for future code. Some advocated using the JDK logging if Java 1.4 was guarenteed, others recommended using Log4j whatever the situation. It was also suggested that the use of a facade such as commons-logging should be limitted to situations where chioce is needed. Browse the archive for further detail [8].

Is it time for a new look Jakarta? Maybe a unified Apache site look and feel? Christoph Wilhelms suggested the use of his FakeForrest skin to give Jakarta a facelift [9]. This offers a Forrest[10] look a like and could act as a stepping stone towards the eventual use of forrest for the websites.

Finally, several people have been elected as new members of the Jakarta PMC [11], they are:

# Nicola Ken Barozzi
# Robert Burrel Donkin
# Stephen Colebourne
# Martin Cooper
# Henri Gomez
# John Keyes
# Larry Isaacs
# Otis Gospodnetic
# Thomas Mahler
# Remy Maucherat
# Glenn Nielsen
# Andrew C Oliver
# Rob Oxspring
# Martin Poeschl
# Scott Sanders
# David Sean Taylor
# Glen Stampoultzis
# Mladen Turk
# James Turner
# Henri Yandell

# [1] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&by=thread&from=305266
# [2] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&by=thread&from=309508
# [3] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/
# [4] - http://www.gmane.org/
# [5] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&by=thread&from=308677
# [6] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&by=thread&from=308715
# [7] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&by=thread&from=308716
# [8] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&by=thread&from=314971
# [9] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&by=thread&from=315699
# [10] - http://xml.apache.org/forrest/
# [11] - http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&msgNo=14080

Commons
=======

Due to the diverse nature of the commons group, this section has been split up to make it easier to pick out the topics of interest. This months stories come from the following:

# Codec
# HttpClient


Codec
-----
"definitive implementations of common encodings"
Editor: Tim O'brien

The codec project is alive again, and moving towards a release. Codec's short-term goals include: moving towards definitive implementations of common encodings such as Base64 and Hex, and developing a cohesive framework for expansion.

HttpClient
----------
"HttpClient provides client side HTTP 1.0/1.1 connectivity to any Java component"
Editor: Jeffrey Dever

Release 2.0 Alpha 2!

After many months and a great resurgence of developers, the new build of HttpClient is finally here. The new group of developers has done extensive refactoring to move the project along the new vision. The code base has reached a significant level of maturity and we expect that another released build (possibly a beta) will be ready near the end of February

Also check out the new HttpClient logo on the website created by Jeff Dever with the Gimp!

http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/httpclient/



db.apache.org
=============
" Database Software "
Editior: Martin Poeschl

The DB project was created to allow the collection of similar technologies into one larger subcommunity.

The following jakarta projects moved to the db project

# ojb
# turbine-torque
# commons-sql

http://db.apache.org



Lucene
======
" A high-performance, full-featured text search engine "
Editor: Otis Gospodnetic

This month's notes come straight from Lucene's CHANGES.txt file. In addition to that I'll only mention that the Lucene team is preparing for packaging the first release candidate for the 1.3 release.

a. Queries are no longer modified during a search. This makes it possible, e.g., to reuse the same query instance with multiple indexes from multiple threads.

b. Term-expanding queries (e.g. PrefixQuery, WildcardQuery, etc.) now work correctly with MultiSearcher, fixing bugs 12619 and 12667.

c. Boosting BooleanQuery's now works, and is supported by the query parser (problem reported by Lee Mallabone). Thus a query like "(+foo +bar)^2 +baz" is now supported and equivalent to "(+foo^2 +bar^2) +baz".

d. New method: Query.rewrite(IndexReader). This permits a query to re-write itself as an alternate, more primitive query. Most of the term-expanding query classes (PrefixQuery, WildcardQuery, etc.) are now implemented using this method.

e. New method: Searchable.explain(Query q, int doc). This returns an Explanation instance that describes how a particular document is scored against a query. An explanation can be displayed as either plain text, with the toString() method, or as HTML, with the toHtml() method. Note that computing an explanation is as expensive as executing the query over the entire index. This is intended to be used in developing Similarity implementations, and, for good performance, should not be displayed with every hit.

f. Scorer and Weight are public, not package protected. It now possible for someone to write a Scorer implementation that is not in the org.apache.lucene.search package. This is still fairly advanced programming, and I don't expect anyone to do this anytime soon, but at least now it is possible.

g. Added public accessors to the primitive query classes (TermQuery, PhraseQuery and BooleanQuery), permitting access to their terms and clauses.



POI
===
"APIs for manipulating various file formats based upon Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format"
Editor: Glen Stampoultzis

Rainer completed the HPSF documentation. It now includes general property set streams.

Carey Sublette let us know about an issue surrounding incompatibilities between how Excel processes unicode. Even though unicode is the standard according to the Excel97 Developers kit it seems that Excel sometimes allows invalid characters from the Cp1252 codepage. He plans on submitting a patch.

Jason Height has been trying to implement the DBCell and Index records.

Andy wrote up some details on how to refactor and complete the formula parsing [1].

Patch for custom formula palette's added by Brian Sanders

Gump build has made a positive build of Jakarta POI using the latest release of Centipede

Performance branch made and committed by Andy. This reduces memory dramatically and increases execution speed but still has a few things to be ironed out before a merge occurs back to the trunk.

# [1] - http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?RefactorAndCompleteFormulaParsingÎ!


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