Releases

We released three versions of Apache Jackrabbit; 1.2.1 in January, 1.2.2 in February, and 1.2.3 in March.

The 1.2 release candidate needed to be cancelled and repackaged as 1.2.1 due to a last-minute issue that was raised during the release vote. This prompted a discussion on release candidates and versioning, which in turn resulted in some improvements to our release process.

We are currently working on the 1.3 release.

Community

Przemyslaw Pakulski was added as a committer and PMC member.

The user mailing list that was launched last year has reached the activity level of the development list and continues steady growth. The total mailing list activity is now higher than ever before.

One session and one tutorial on JCR/Jackrabbit have been scheduled for the upcoming ApacheCon EU. We are also planning to organize a Jackrabbit BOF during the conference.

Based on the experiences from last summer, we are proposing a Google Summer of Code 2007 project to build a JCR demo application based on Apache Jackrabbit.

There is interest in starting a new incubating content analysis toolkit project named Tika. Hopefully the project will as a side effect build more bridges between the Lucene and Jackrabbit communities.

Development

The 1.2 releases include a new beta-level clustering feature that is attracting much interest. Many corner cases are being ironed out based on feedback and bug reports from the user community, and it seems that we can soon declare the feature stable.

The main new feature in the 1.3 release is a set of “bundle persistence manager” components contributed by Day. These components bring a major performance boost to many Jackrabbit user cases. The contributed IP has been cleared and is now being integrated into the Jackrabbit codebase.

There have been a number of cases where users have suggested some internal changes to better handle specific performance and other requirements. Unfortunately few of such discussions have resulted in proposed patches. We should do better to encourage patch submissions.

Infrastructure

The Solaris zone we requested is now up and running. We have a Continuum installation doing nightly builds and continuous integration tests for all the Jackrabbit release components. So far we've seen zero build-breaking commits.