The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache ACE as a Top-Level Project

Open Source OSGi software distribution framework especially suited for the Cloud and embedded computing markets

Forest Hill, MD – 27 February 2012 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache ACE has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.

Apache ACE is a software distribution framework for managing and distributing modular software components, configuration data, and other artifacts to OSGi-based and related target systems.

Comprising a set of OSGi bundles, Apache ACE allows developers to easily manage the dependencies, deployment, and feedback of installed software components. This proves particularly useful when scaling across embedded and Cloud computing applications by covering the area of deploying and dynamically scaling applications in the cloud, as well as mobile platforms that would utilize ACE to create their own market or application store.

Using Apache ACE, updates and new components can be easily distributed while keeping a full history of what was installed where and during what period. In addition, ACE helps developers set up an automated development, QA/testing, staging, and production environment.
Initially donated to the Apache Incubator in 2009 by software solutions provider Luminis, a diverse and international group of developers joined the initial developers of the ACE code base to successfully form the Apache ACE community.

“We are excited that ACE has successfully graduated as a Top-Level Project,” said Marcel Offermans, Vice President of Apache ACE and Fellow at Luminis. “Developing projects ‘The Apache Way’ stimulates widespread cooperation with individuals that each bring their specific knowledge to the project. Diversity is key — the community is evolving the project in new and interesting ways, leveraging the collective expertise.”

Availability and Oversight

Apache ACE software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project’s day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache ACE source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://ace.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world’s most popular Web server software. Through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as “The Apache Way,” more than 350 individual Members and 3,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation’s official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP, Hortonworks, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

“Apache”, “Apache ACE”, and “ApacheCon” are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Sources: Apache Software Foundation, MarketWatch

Forge Arquillian plugin 2.0 BETA 1

I’m happy to release the first beta of the 2.0 version of the Arquillian Forge plugin on the last day of the year.

What’s new?

Forge Beta5 compatibility

Forge is getting close to final and we are making the latest API changes, which unfortunately broke some plugins. The 2.0 version of the Arquillian plugin works with the latest and greatest release again.

More containers and easier maintenance

The amount of containers supported by Arquillian starts to be a little overwhelming. It’s absolutely great to see the community building support for more and more containers. This started to be a problem for maintaining the Forge plugin however. It’s hard to track compatibility issues with containers if I’m not actively using them myself. In the previous version of the plugin the support for each container was hard coded. There is nothing really wrong with that, but it’s hard for other developers to help out by fixing or creating support for a new container; first of all you would need to know something about writing Forge plugins.

In the 2.0 version of the plugin all containers are described in a JSON format. Adding a new container is as simple as adding the container description to this JSON file, making it trivial for anyone to contribute on this. It gets even better; when the new Arquillian website goes live at some point in the future, the containers will be parsed from the documentation directly. Simply documenting a container would be enough to add support to the plugin.

For the release of this beta I added support for all containers listed in the documentation. Note however that some of the documentation is outdated and not working. It would be great if people contribute patches to the container configuration JSON file.

Container configuration

In Arquillian containers can be configured in arquillian.xml. Here you can set hostnames, ports, usernames etc. depending on the container’s capabilities. Forge now helps setting those properties.

Simply type:

arquillian configure-container --profile [maven-profile-id]

Of course you can use the TAB key to choose from the Maven profiles in your POM. Forge will now prompt which configuration option you want to set and lists all possible options for that specific container including it’s type and description. Choose an option and type a value. Forge adds this to the arquillian.xml file.

Try it!

Make sure you have the latest Forge release installed. In Forge simply type:

forge install-plugin arquillian