The Apache Software Foundation Reflects On Advances and Accomplishments During 2005, Highlighting 10-Year Anniversary of World's Most Popular Web Server

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) - stewards, incubators, and developers of leading Open Source projects, including the Apache HTTP Server, the world's most popular Web server software for ten years running - reflects on its activities and milestones achieved during 2005.

"We are honored to be the trusted resource that the community looks to for leadership in Open Source software development. Our growth in the past year is testament to our long-standing commitment to collaboration among our diverse contributor base and our extended community. We are pleased to announce more than two dozen project updates over the course of 2005," said ASF Chairman Greg Stein.

In addition to the Apache HTTP Server, recognized ASF projects include Ant, Axis Web Services, Derby, Forrest, Geronimo, James, Lenya, Lucene, Maven, mod_perl, MyFaces, Tomcat, SpamAssassin, Struts, Tapestry, and Xerces - from the core basics to in-demand solutions such as scalable Internet architectures, Cocoon, DB, Jakarta, and XML. All software developed within the ASF is free to download, use, modify, and distribute under the Open Source Apache License.

"We will continue to champion the innovation, implementation, and integration of freely available enterprise-grade software that meets the most rigorous demands of our community," added Stein. "Our consistent achievements are testament to the strengths of our community-centric development model."

Highlighted accomplishments from the ASF's industry-defining projects include: Apache HTTP Server: Driving more than 70% of all sites on the Internet, the Apache HTTP Server is the backbone of more Websites than any other Web server software. A decade after releasing HTTP Server version 1.0, the Apache Software Foundation announced the availability of version 2.2 of the Apache HTTP Server - the most powerful, flexible, and scalable release yet. Tested extensively on major sites under heavy load, HTTP Server 2.2 offers many new improvements such as proxy enhancements, large-file support, graceful-stop, and mod_cache. HTTP Server 2.2 couples these improvements with the speed, reliability, and scalability necessary to power today's busiest Websites: from real-time news sources, to Fortune 100 enterprise portals, to mission-critical military intelligence applications, and beyond.

"Our site has been using pre-releases of the new version for over 6 months and has handled up to 27,000 concurrent downloads from a single web server, while delivering terabytes of content per day," said Colm MacCarthaigh of HEAnet. "Large-file support, graceful-stop and mod_cache have improved our level of service dramatically." ApacheCon: The official conference of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) united the industry's leading Open Source developers and users this past July with ApacheCon's return to Europe, and most recently in San Diego in December 2005. The demand for real world insight and greater understanding of key Apache software projects is evidenced by the growing interest in ApacheCon: an all-time record in participation, attendance, and sponsorships surpassed those of past conferences. More than 100 sessions addressed core and next-generation Open Source issues, including technology trends, development and deployment, communities, and business model innovation. Conference presenters and faculty included some of the most widely recognized leaders in the Open Source community, such as Cory Doctorow, Jaron Lanier, Simon Phipps, and Tim Bray. Key sponsors and exhibitors include Black Hat, Covalent, Google, IBM, Intel, the Java Community Process (JCP), LogicBlaze, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, thawte, and Virtuas. Apache Ant: With the Ant 1.6.5 release in May 2005, Java developers obtained a stable and well-supported build tool that lets Java developers build, test and deploy applications on any Java-enabled platform. One measure of the project's success is the increasing competition between mainstream Java IDEs to provide comprehensive Ant integration - ranging from Ant-aware editing and debugging (IntelliJ IDEA) to an Ant-only build process (NetBeans). Apache Ant has effectively lowered the cost of switching between IDEs, allowing developers to work with their favorite products, and enabled continuous integration tools such as Apache Gump and Apache Maven's Continuum server to facilitate automated build processes. Apache Axis2: As a natural progressor to the highly regarded Apache Axis project, Axis2 is blazing the trail to be the core of a clean and extensible open source Web Services platform. Building on the "handler chain" model of Apache Axis, Axis2 introduces a more flexible modular architecture. Axis2's extensibility allows it to be a foundation for implementing Web Services protocols including reliable messaging with Apache Sandesha, security through Apache WSS4J and transactions through Apache Kandula. The high performance lightweight XML object model AXIOM enables both maximum flexibility and performance. This object model allows Axis2 to support multiple levels of abstraction for consuming and offering Web services. Axis2 is currently in a 0.94 release and is nearing its 1.0 status. Apache Beehive: The newly available Apache Beehive 1.0 makes J2EE programming easier by building a simple object model on J2EE and Apache Struts. Using JSR-175 annotations to simplify application development for developers and the creation of Java development tools by independent software vendors, Beehive 1.0 is built around the following projects -- all of which can be used together or separately depending on the requirements of a specific application: 1) NetUI, the annotation-driven Web application programming framework built atop Apache Struts to centralize navigation logic, state, metadata, and exception handling in one reusable controller class. Now able to provide features such as nesting (also known as sub-flows), UI dialogs, state scoping, and JavaScript pop-up support, the framework provides a set of JSP tags for rendering (X)HTML and higher-level UI constructs such as data grids and trees, and integrates well with JavaServer Faces and Struts; 2) Controls, a resource abstraction framework that enables a consistent JavaBean API to access enterprise resources such as databases and message queues, and provides a readymade set of abstracted system controls for low-level J2EE resource APIs such as Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), Java Messaging Service (JMS), and Java Database Connectivity (JDBC); and 3) Web Service Metadata (WSM), the Apache Axis-based implementation of JSR 181, which standardizes a simplified, annotation-driven model for building Java Web Services. Apache Cocoon: The long-awaited release of Apache Cocoon 2.1.8 was made available. The latest version of the Web development framework is built around the concept of separation of concerns and component-oriented Web RAD, features several bug fixes, additions, and improvements. They include: AJAX support for partial updates to a form; new tree widget; experimental code for reusable form libraries (part of the Google Summer of Code project) and a sample showing how to create forms using relational databases with zero Java code; stack traces; enhancements to the portal block, including improved caching mechanisms, support for the Web Services For Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard, and provided components for database access using OJB; simplified build process; reworked Cocoon documentation system (now using Daisy); new JCR block allowing access to JCR repositories such as JackRabbit (Java Content Repository specification was designed as a part of JSR170); new validation block providing the ability to validate XML in a pipeline choosing from a range of schema languages (DTD, XSD, RNG); and the ability to use Cocoon pipelines to render JSF pages. Apache FOP: A product of the Apache XML Graphics Project, Apache FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) is the world's first print formatter driven by the widely deployed XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO) standard, as well as the world's first output independent formatter. The Java application reads a formatting object (FO) tree and renders the resulting pages to a specified output, including PDF, PS, XML (area tree representation), Print, RTF, AWT, MIF and TXT. After a three-year redesign effort, the FOP team has announced its first beta quality release that provides many long-awaited features. Apache Geronimo: The Geronimo project team announced the much-anticipated Geronimo 1.0, following two years of extensive effort including testing on Linux, Windows, MacOS and zLinux as well as many hardware platforms. J2EE 1.4 certified, Geronimo 1.0 offers one of the most flexible architectures in the application server market, allowing an unmatched ease of integration via its kernel and GBean architecture. The release included support for Java Business Integration (JBI), Jetty or Tomcat Web container deployment options, a complete Web-enabled management console based on Java Portlets, full integration with the Eclipse Web Tools Project, and integration of Apache Derby and the Apache Directory Server. In addition to the release of Geronimo 1.0, the following sister projects are being incubated as Geronimo subprojects: ActiveMQ, ServiceMix, and WADI. All of these projects in incubation already make use of the Apache License 2.0. Apache Maven: The Apache Maven project announced Maven 2.0.1 and Continuum 1.0.2, that, together offer a platform that delivers declarative build, dependency management, documentation creation, site publication and distribution capabilities to enable project visibility and management. Based on a unified Project Object Model (POM) architecture, Maven 2.0 consists of metadata for describing clear, consistent phases for building projects, and offers a unique plug-in environment that provides an extensible development framework to support multiple languages for total re-usability across projects. Maven 2.0 also features new software 'DNA' mapping to track and manage transitive build dependencies across repositories. The fastest growing build system for Java-based projects, Continuum 1.0 enables continuous integration by both automating the testing and packaging phases of the software build and providing reports on build status, including success, failure and unit test coverage. Apache mod_perl: The Apache Perl project released the long-awaited mod_perl version 2.0, bringing mod_perl to the Apache HTTP Server 2.x series. With mod_perl, developers can write server modules entirely in Perl, providing a powerful combination of rapid development and high performance for Web applications. By providing access to the HTTP Server API from Perl, mod_perl offers a level of access and flexibility not available in other high-level Web development solutions. Prominent new or improved features in mod_perl 2.0 include an I/O Filtering API which allows chaining of different content generation tools (PHP, server-side includes) and post-processing of dynamic content, a new testing framework for automated testing of server modules and applications, easy access to Apache configuration information from Perl, configurable multi-threaded operation which vastly improves scalability in Microsoft Windows environments, and protocol modules which can replace the server's core HTTP implementation with alternatives like SMTP, FTP, or even entirely custom protocols. Apache MyFaces: Apache MyFaces is the first free open-source implementation of the JavaServer Faces (JSF) standard for developing web applications in the Java programming language. In 2005, Apache MyFaces achieved full compatibility to the JSF specification and passed the JSFT Technology Compatibility Kit test. Apache MyFaces also released versions 1 and 1.1, where 1.1 was the first fully JSF specification compliant version. Over this year, MyFaces steadily built out its component-set - from dynamic trees to popup-calendars, MyFaces features components for most web developer's needs. Apache Portals: After more than two years in development, the Apache Portals project released the Jetspeed 2 Open Source Enterprise Portal, a full implementation of the Java Portlet API. Notable features include security components backed by LDAP and database implementations and some robust administration interfaces. Custom portals can be built and deployed using the Jetspeed plugin for Apache Maven. The Jetspeed PSML language can be used to assemble portlets with the Apache Portals Bridges project to 'bridge' portals with existing technologies including Struts, JSF, PHP, and Perl. Offering GUI designers several built-in templates to decorate portals and portlets, Jetspeed 2 is fully compliant with the Portlet Specification 1.0 (JSR-168), has passed the TCK (Test Compatibility Kit) suite, and is fully certified to the Java Portlet Standard. ABOUT THE APACHE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION

The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects. The Foundation provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits contributors' potential legal exposure. Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products. For more information on the Foundation and its projects, please visit http://www.apache.org/