2022-04 April Report

## Description:
The mission of Apache Fineract is the creation and maintenance of software 
related to a core banking platform that provides a reliable, robust, and 
affordable solution for entrepreneurs, financial institutions, and service 
providers to offer financial services to the world's underbanked and unbanked.

## Issues:

There are no issues requiring board attention.

## Membership Data:

Apache Fineract was founded 2017-04-19 (5 years ago)
There are currently 46 committers and 19 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 2:1.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Aleksandar Vidakovic on 2020-10-11.
- Arnold Galovics was added as committer on 2022-03-15

## Project Activity:

• DONE: Release 1.6.0
• DONE: Migrated all old Spring XML configuration to Spring Java configuration
• DONE: Major JAX-RS Jersey upgrade from 1.x to 2.x
• DONE: Major improvements to make Fineract more configurable (without recompiles); database configuration cleaned up, SSL, cache, connection pool are completely configurable now, no more hardcoded values
• DONE: Proper use of environment variables for configuration; properties based configuration to select authentication scheme (was previously done by copying different application.properties files during compile)
• DONE: Improved and faster Docker image builds with Google JIB
• DONE: Introduced Asciidoc for documentation (existing minimal documentation migrated, ongoing effort)
• DONE: Support for JDK17 LTS (was JDK11 LTS previously)
• DONE: Automatic Gradle project versioning (was previously done manually, Gradle plugin takes care of this now based on Git information)
• DONE: Dropped Drizzle JDBC driver; using now MariaDB JDBC driver (that we can package with the distribution)
• DONE: Added support for PostgreSQL
• DONE: Replaced OpenJPA with EclipseLink
• DONE: Replace Flyway with Liquibase for database migration
• DONE: Introduction of Lombok to reduce boilerplate code (ongoing effort)
• DONE: Fixed Sonar security hotspots
• DONE: Introduced Cucumber BDD testing
• DONE: Work on making Fineract more modular started
• DONE: Build speed improvements
• DONE: Node aware job schedulers
• WIP: Alternative implementation for the reporting module based on Eclipse BIRT (replacing Pentaho hosted at mifos)
• WIP: (Semi-) automatic releases with JReleaser
• WIP: Enforcement of architecture rules with ArchUnit
• WIP: Migrate integration tests to Cucumber and replace test infrastructure (Gradle Cargo Tomcat plugin, external MariaDB setup) with ready to use Testcontainers (working on test speed)
• ApacheCon 2022 is already been planned as the team works to organize another FInTech Track.

## Community Health:

Fineract Community has been very healthy and active over the past 3 months as new contributors from companies using Fineract for commercial purposes have been giving back to the community. This is seen as the activities on Dev and issue lists have increased. There is more than a 100% rise in the code contributions over the past few months.