Typically, Apache's technologies can be leveraged in commercial offerings. "Companies take our technology and use them in commercial products and commit people to develop the code," said Jim Jagielski, executive vice president of the Apache Software Foundation and CTO of Covalent Technologies. "It's a nice, mutually beneficial relationship."
Version 2.0 of the popular Struts framework was unveiled, featuring easier testing and control. "The actual controller of the Struts framework is much more easy to customize," Jagielski said.
Struts also now will be easier to use in conjunction with another popular framework: Spring. "Basically, now they just plug right in together," Jagielski said.
With Version 2.0, Apache renews development of Struts. "It kind of stagnated for a while," said Jagielski.
The release of Jackrabbit Version 1.1 provides a conforming implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API. Applications using content repositories typically include systems for content, document and records management. The 1.1 release is an incremental release fixing a number of issues and introducing new features. The most notable change, according to Apache, was the removal of the Apache Xerces dependency and an improved item state cache. Xerces is an XML parser project at Apache.
Apache at the conference also rolled out Jakarta Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) 1.0, for integrating Java applications with existing non-Java applications, such as linking Java applications or libraries with C or Perl-based environments. "It's the first major release of the BSF," Jagielski said.
The Jakarta top-level project, however, will eventually give way to projects standing on their own, said Jagielski. "When Jakarta started, the projects [contained within it] were very small," he said.
"It made sense from a management and oversight [perspective] to lump those under an umbrella," he said.
The Apache Directory DS (Directory Server) 1.0 and its certification by The Open Group also were hailed at the event. DS is a full LDAP implementation for functions such as password authentication.
"It makes it much easier for other Java-based applications such as application servers to natively include LDAP capability," said Jagielski.
The Apache foundation unveiled sponsorship program, in which companies and individuals can make monetary contributions to the foundation and in return receive benefits such as recognition on the Apache Web site. Several levels of sponsorship are featured.
Chariot Solutions (http://www.chariotsolutions.com/home/index.jsp) during the conference announced plug-ins and migration tools for the Apache Geronimo J2EE server. New Geronimo components include a Tomcat-to-Geronimo migration tool, a Java Persistence API (JPA) plug-in and a plug-in for JasperReports, which is an open source Java reporting tool.