March 2007 Board Report

There are four areas of activities in Roller right now, here's a
summary of status and progress in each.

Graduation

Apache Roller has graduated so now we're trying to get a website up
and running at roller.apache.org. We've filed a JIRA request with the
INFRA team (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-1181). Once we
get up and running we'll make more formal announcements and perhaps a
press release via the PRC. We have a new release ready (3.1) that
could coincide with the announcement.

Roller 3.1 release

At RC5, Roller 3.1 is just about ready to roll. We could hold off and
time the release with the graduation announcements, or not. The What's
New in Roller 3.1 page is here: http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/What%27s+new+in+Roller+3.1

Roller 4.0 release

In 4.0 we plan to make some infrastructural changes to Roller;
switching to a new non-Hibernate backend, requiring Java SE 5 and
starting the Struts2 migration. We were planning to wrap up work by
late March, but a host of new proposals just rolled in so March is
probably out of the picture. The latest 4.0 proposal is here: http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Roller+4.0+Release

Hibernate replacement for 4.0

We'll soon have a couple of options for replacing Hibernate, our sole
remaining LGPL dependency. Craig Russell and Mitesh Mewani developed a
new JPA based backend for Roller using a datamapper abstraction that
allows support of JPA, JDO and other technologies. Dave Johnson
developed a new version of the JPA backend that calls JPA directly.
Elias Torres reports that IBM will soon donate an iBatis
implementation as well. We hope to find consensus on which one to use
by doing a bake-off.