Apache HTTP Server

The Apache CloudStack project is pleased to announce the 4.0.2 release of the CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform. This is a minor release in the 4.0.0 branch, which contains fixes for 40 bugs. Apache ... [More] CloudStack is an integrated software platform that allows users to build a feature-rich IaaS. CloudStack includes an intuitive user interface and rich API for managing the compute, networking, accounting, and storage for private, hybrid, or public clouds. The project entered the Apache Incubator in April 2012, and graduated in March 2013. The 4.0.2 release includes fixes for a number of issues, including two minor security vulnerabilities (CVE–2013–2756 and CVE–2013–2758), problems displaying storage statistics, a fix for the SSVM HTTP proxy, support for CentOS 6.4, and other fixes. Downloads The official source code releases can be downloaded from: http://cloudstack.apache.org/downloads.html In addition to the official source code release, individual contributors have also made convenience binaries available on the Apache CloudStack download page. About Apache CloudStack Apache CloudStack is a complete software suite for creating Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Target environments include service providers and enterprises. It is used by many service providers to set up an on-demand, elastic cloud computing services and by enterprises to set up a private cloud for use by their own employees. Apache CloudStack is also available to individuals and organizations that wish to study and implement an IaaS for personal, educational, and/or production use. Further information on Apache CloudStack can be found at cloudstack.apache.org. [Less]

The Apache TomEE project is proud to announce the availability of TomEE 1.5.2, a maintenance release focused on driving stability and maturity into the 1.5.x codebase. The 1.5.2 release does contain minor new features and improvements around ... [More] tooling, such as the Arquillian adapters and TomEE Maven Plugin as well as key upgrades such as Tomcat 7.0.39 and OpenWebBeans 1.1.8. The vast majority of server-side new features and improvements are targeted at the coming TomEE 1.6.0 which has a very strong performance focus, specifically for small devices such as the Raspberry PI. In keeping with the project's open focus on delivering frequent releases and builds, the project has setup infrastructure for publishing builds of both stable (1.5.x) and development (1.6.x) branches of TomEE. We invite all members of the community to become part of the development process by trying builds out early, giving feedback and making feature requests. The project would like to thank all members of the community who gave feedback to 1.5.2 and are actively working with us on creating the best possible 1.6.0. Our user list traffic continues to expand at exponential rates (5x over last year and growing) and we're doing everything we can do to deliver you more TomEE, faster and better. Keeping a focus on maintenance releases while we chase down the next latest and greatest TomEE version is our way of sending a very deep and heartfelt thank you. [Less]

This time around, we have two release VOTEs in progress, which means that 4.1.0 is just about out the door. The CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2013 has been announced for June 23rd through 25th. You'll also want to check in on the discussions ... [More] about the length of the release cycle, Chip Childers and David Nalley appearing on FLOSS Weekly, and much more. A lot has happened since the last issue of the CloudStack Weekly News, and not just because the community's been busy – we missed getting last week's issue out. Sorry about that! If you'd like to see consistent weekly delivery, check the end of the newsletter to see how you can help. Major Discussions In this section, we summarize some of the more interesting discussions taking place in the CloudStack community. While we try to pull out the discussions that are "don't miss" discussions to anyone who's involved in using or contributing to CloudStack, it's a really good idea to make sure you're subscribed to the mailing lists and follow along. Release Schedule Animesh Chaturvedi started a discussion last week about the release schedule for 4.2.0, trying to nail down the specific dates for feature freeze, docs freeze, etc. That was accompanied by a question of whether we should consider a six-month cycle. Ultimately, no resolution was reached on the schedule. Animesh has started a new thread to discuss the release cycle. Easier Simple Installs David has started a conversation on dev@ about the ease, or lack thereof, of installing CloudStack. David says, "what I want to do is get rid of sections 2-4 of the quick install guide, and replace it with - 'run this one or two lines worth of commands' (http://s.apache.org/runbook)." David describes what he'd like to see: The all-in-one installation process I'd like to see: Install your host OS Install an meta-RPM/Deb that either (installs everything, or alternatively configures a repo - or just installs the repo and the stuff I need to install with) Run a command that activates one of these config tools - configures the machine, installs the packages I need, and gets me to the point where I'm ready to login and go through the beautiful new user gui setup stuff. No further comments on this so far. Developing a Storage Backup Object Store Plugin Framework Min Chin has proposed a storage backup object store plugin framework that would "allow CloudStack to systematically manage and configure various types of backup data stores from different vendors, like NFS, S3, Swift, etc." Specifically, Min says: With this new plugin framework, we would like to achieve following functionalities: 1. Support different object store providers in a uniform and pluggable fashion. 2. Enable region wide object backup using S3-like object store. 3. Provide pluggable data motion strategies to handle data transfer from one data store to another data store. 4. Provide a scalable cache storage framework while moving data between primary storage and backup storage for certain hypervisor needs. 5. Support flexible combinations of primary storage, secondary storage and hypervisors, such as (NFS, NFS, Xen), (NF3, S3, Vmware), (ISCSI, Swift, KVM), ..., etc. The FS is on the wiki, and Min says in a follow-up that there's a plan to "provide a sample plugin implementation" for the work. With regards to compatibility concerns, Edison Su responds that existing APIs "can still be wired to new code" so that they continue to work, but "we can mark them as deprecated in the API document." Edison also notes that it can co-exist with the existing deployments and upgrades from pre-4.2.0 versions to 4.2.0 if the feature is accepted. VOTEs for 4.1.0 and 4.0.2 After a couple of false starts, it looks like the third time is the charm for the 4.0.2 release. Joe Brockmeier started the third voting round on Saturday 20 April, and it has quite a few +1 (binding) votes so far. Unless -1'ed by Tuesday morning, it will be ready for release. Chip has also started the first vote for 4.1.0, which will be open for 72 hours – assuming no show-stopping defects are found, and it garners at least 3 +1 PMC votes. Note that everyone in the CloudStack community is encouraged to test out the release candidate and cast a vote, regardless of whether the vote is "binding" or not. More testing is always better, and an informed -1 from a non-PMC member isn't going to be ignored when deciding whether to release or not. Domain Admin Limitations Pranav Saxena has raised a discussion about the limitations for DOMAIN admins, and wonders "why hasn't the domain -admin been given the privilege of creating sub-child domains himself? Are there any concerns/threats because of which the current architecture doesn't serve this purpose?" Alena Prokharchyk responds that there may be a feature request matching Pranav's concerns and suggests checking its status. This might be a good feature/improvement to see in 4.2.0 if there's not already work afoot. CloudStack Planet - Posts from the CloudStack Community FLOSS Weekly Interview on Apache CloudStack: Chip and David appeared on FLOSS Weekly on April 10th. If you missed the live show, be sure to checkout the video. 4.0.2 Testing Procedure: Sebastien Goasguen has put together a screencast for testing the 4.0.2 release that also might be worth looking over for folks interested in testing any CloudStack release. Google Summer of Code with CloudStack: Sebastien has also put together a slide show about contributing to the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) with CloudStack. Knife CloudStack plugin 0.0.14 has been released: Sander Botman writes about the latest release of the CloudStack plugin. David has also written about the new knife-cloudstack plugin. To REST or not to REST: Sebastien tackles the question, "is the CloudStack API RESTful?" The short answer is "the CloudStack API is RESTlike but not RESTful since it is only based on the GET method. Being an http based API that can return JSON does not make it a RESTfull API. This should not be seen as negative criticism but just a clarification." Read the rest for the full scoop. Zone X is Not Ready to Launch Console Proxy Yet: Wido den Hollander writes about an odd error that he troubleshot to find an unlikely culprit. Upcoming Events LinuxFest Northwest is being held in Bellingham, Washington from 27 April to 28 April. Mark Hinkle is presenting the Hitchhiker's Guide to Open Source Cloud Computing on Saturday 27 April at 11:00. David Nalley is presenting Building IaaS Clouds with Apache CloudStack on Saturday 27 April at 1:30. Storage in Apache CloudStack being held by the CloudStack SF Bay Area Users Group on April 30, 2013 @ Citrix Conference Center, sign up on the Meetup.com Website. Build a Cloud Day CloudCon San Francisco being held at the South San Francisco Conference Center on 15 May. CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2013 is being held from 23 June to 25 June in Santa Clara, CA at the Santa Clara Convention Center. See the Call for Proposals if you're interested in speaking! If you want to to check in on events related to Apache CloudStack, see the Lanyard Page for the Apache CloudStack topic. Jira With the 4.0.2 and 4.1.0 VOTES in process, it's time to start looking at bugs against 4.1.1 and 4.2.0. At the moment, bugs against 4.1.0 haven't been re-assigned to 4.1.1. This means that the bug counts for 4.1.1 are much lower than they should be. Taking into account the actual number of bugs, we're looking at one blocker bug, two critical bugs, 114 major bugs, and 25 minor. For 4.2.0, we have: 5 blocker bugs for 4.2.0. 34 critical bugs for 4.2.0. 263 major bugs for 4.2.0. 35 minor bugs for 4.2.0. New Committers and PMC Members Bruno Demion was invited to become a committer and has accepted. Go Chiba was invited to become a committer and has accepted. Prasanna Santhanam was invited to become a PMC member and has accepted. Please join us in congratulating all of the new committers and PMC members! Contributing to the Weekly News Want to keep reading the CloudStack Weekly News? Many hands make light work, but having only one editor means getting the weekly news out every week is a "best effort" activity. A healthy community publication needs several contributors to ensure weekly issues go out on time. If you have an event, discussion, or other item to contribute to the Weekly News, you can add it directly to the wiki by editing the issue you want your item to appear in. (The next week's issue is created before the current issue is published - so at any time there should be at least one issue ready to edit.) Alternatively, you can send a note to the [email protected] mailing list with a subject including News: description of topic or email the newsletter editor directly (jzb at apache.org), again with the subject News: description of topic. Please include a link to the discussion in the mailing list archive or Web page with details of the event, etc. [Less]

The Apache log4j team would like to welcome Remko Popma as a new committer! Welcome Remko!

I should've written this blog right after the Strata BigData conference back in February '13, so it is long overdue. However, it is still very much actual, so better late than never. It was interesting and reassuring to see that so many ... [More] commercial vendors have jumped on the Hadoop bandwagon this year. I won't even go into details regarding who came up with what here, but you can google that easily or simply read this short overview.What I want to put in the spotlight is a fact that hasn't been widely publicized, if at all: the vast majority of these distributions are using the Apache BigTop project to build and maintain their stacks. The list of companies that publicly attribute their product to BigTop can be found here.Here are three major points behind the growing popularity of the BigTop project: to date, this is the only framework available that allows anyone to build a Hadoop-based data stack with a predefined set of properties in a matter of a few hours test it in both a secured and non-secured environment using painless deployment with state-of-the-art Puppet recipes stacks powered by BigTop have uniform management and administration interfaces, so you don't need to learn how to install/update your cluster if you ever decide to switch from Apache release components to the Best-Distribution-From-Elbonia brand BigTop helps to keep the torrent of changes in check on all levels of the stack that might affect intercomponent compatibility. This is of tremendous help to release managers who want to be good citizens of this ecosystem. BigTop provides a place where people of all backgrounds can come and work together to solve the problems they are faced with With the coming release of 0.6 -- stay tuned -- we are going to push the bar a little bit higher again and make the next version of the stack better than ever -- with the great help of all the free-minded developers of the Apache Software Foundation! Come and join us at bigtop.apache.org and #bigtop on freenode.net. [Less]

Viewers of the hit ABC sitcom Suburgatory may have noticed something special in the season 2 finale last night, in an episode called "Apocalypse Meow".  Lead character Tessa (played by Jane Levy) used the free, open source office productivity ... [More] software Apache OpenOffice on her Mac, to outline the pros and cons of getting revenge on her nemesis Dalia: Those with access (and this may have geo-based access restrictions) can see scene starting at the 8:50 mark on ABC's online version of the episode. This is an example of "stage dressing".  The designer in a play, movie or television show has a particular "look" in mind, to bring life to the script.  The designer then works with the properties  directory to provision the right props.   Most of it is physical stuff, like furniture, lamps or other similar items.  But contemporary shows, with characters interacting with technology, also use a digital form of stage dressing.  Here's another example, from Roman Polanski's 2011 comedy Carnage: The Apache OpenOffice project has received several requests to use our product in this way, in movies and in US and UK television programs. Why use OpenOffice in such situations?  One guess is that securing rights to use open source software like Apache OpenOffice is easier than getting rights for commercial products.  Another guess is that using open source avoids potential conflicts with advertisers who are selling competing products.  And another guess is that they avoid showing commercial products unless they are paid for placement.   I don't really know.  But in any case we're pleased to see open source software, and especially Apache OpenOffice, featured in the media. [Less]

 What am I looking at? The above image illustrates the social network of posts and responses to the Apache OpenOffice project's main development mailing list, from when it started in May 2011 until the end of March 2013 when this data was ... [More] collected.  (Click on the image to view a larger version)  Each circle represents a person posting to the mailing list.  The arcs represent responses to posts, i.e., they are drawn from the person posting to the person to whose post they are replying.  The weight of each line is proportionate to the number of times person X responded to person Y.  So darker lines portray more frequent communication pathways.  The size of each circle is proportionate to the poster's eigenvector centrality, a theoretical measure of influence within the graph.  The colors represent modularity classes, based a calculation that determines the most tightly-connected portions of the overall graph.  These can represent real-world structures within the community.  Overall the graph has 1077 nodes (persons) and 8181 arcs (response emails).  On average each person responded to 7.6 other persons, and made 27.1 total responses. Now some interpretation.  This is not the the "hub and spokes" or tree pattern of a command/control or hierarchical organization, but a complex organism, with project participants contributing at various levels of engagement.  The larger circles in the center, connected with many and darker lines, are the core project participants (at least on the development list).  The very small circles at the periphery of the graph are those who posted a single question, received a response were never heard of again.  They typically received one or two response posts, but did not really engage further. And in the middle we see additional rich structure of conversation patterns.  The modularity classes, represented by colors here, appear to segment the list participants into what I'll call "programmers", "marketing" and "support", though these labels are imperfect. It is difficult to ascribe too much meaning to these email response patterns.  Some mailing lists have been the topic of research before.  In Q&A forums, where nearly 100% of the initial posts are questions, and responses are all answers, it is interesting to look at the response patterns as an indication of expertise.  See Adamic, et al., for a good example.  We might apply a similar analysis to the support forums.  But with the Dev list, an initial post might be a question, but it is often a report, or a proposal or just information sharing.  And responses are not always expert answers or answers at all.  Some responses are expressing approval or disapproval, or asking questions of their own.  All these factors make this quite complex. How I made the graph I started with the list archives, downloaded the mbox files extracted the response graph to a text file, with a custom python script, using the python "mailbox" package. Then I manually cleaned up the data, coalescing multiple mail accounts used by some members. I used the open source graph visualization package "Gephi" to process the data and draw the graph (layout via the Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm) and export it to a PNG file. [Less]

The Apache Flex team is pleased to announce the availability of the Apache Flex SDK Installer 2.5.4 release. The source distributions and installer binaries can be downloaded here: http://flex.apache.org/installer.html *About the Apache Flex SDK ... [More] Installer* The Apache Flex SDK Installer AIR application provides an easy, single-click installation of the Apache Flex SDK and all its dependencies. This will make it suitable for working with IDEs such as Adobe Flash Builder, FDT, IntelliJ IDEA, FlashDevelop, etc. This tool is intended to allow end users to start building their Apache Flex application within minutes. This also lets you seamlessly transition from older SDKs to the latest Apache Flex SDK release. The application downloads the following: - Apache Flex SDK - The AIR SDK (Windows vs. Mac) based on the current platform - Adobe Flash Player playerglobal.swc - SwfObject - Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) - Adobe Text Layout Format (TLF) Optionally, the application will download these files if the user wants: - Adobe BlazeDS - Adobe Embedded Font Support The application ships with an auto-update functionality that will prompt the users to upgrade to the latest version when a new release is made available. We have made available an installer badge at http://flex.apache.org/download-utilities.html. If you have a blog or a website, you can copy-paste the html code snippet which will help more and more end users to very easily get access to the Apache Flex SDK. They will be able to get setup and start coding within minutes. [Less]

Once again the Apache Software Foundation is a "mentoring organization" in Google Summer of Code, and the Apache OpenOffice project looks forward to this year's program.  We invite students looking to get their hands ... [More] dirty with real-world code to consider submitting an GSoC application related to OpenOffice.  Why OpenOffice? We're one of the most famous open source projects around.  Our latest release has had over 45 million downloads.  The work you do with OpenOffice could be seen by millions of users. We're a fun, international and diverse group of volunteers.  Working with OpenOffice this summer will be fun. The core code for OpenOffice is C++, but extensions can be written in Java, Python and Basic as well.  We probably speak your language. OpenOffice software is central to the daily work of its users, with text documents, spreadsheets and presentations.  There are good opportunities to explore applications that connect OpenOffice to cutting-edge disciplines such as text analytics, natural language processing, social network analysis, the semantic web, etc. We've posted some initial ideas, suggested by our mentors.  But don't feel limited to these ideas.  If you want to work on a variation of one of these ideas, or an entirely different idea, let us know.  If it is a good fit, and a mentor is able to work with you, then let us know.  If you're passionate about something we want to hear about it. For more information, please take a look at the Apache-wide GSoC page where many of your questions may be already answered. Finally, we highly encourage prospective applicants to engage early with the OpenOffice community on our development mailing list. [Less]

Apache CouchDB 1.3.0 has been released and is available for download. CouchDB is a database that completely embraces the web. Store your data with JSON documents. Access your documents with your web browser, via HTTP. Query, combine, and transform ... [More] your documents with JavaScript. CouchDB works well with modern web and mobile apps. You can even serve web apps directly out of CouchDB. And you can distribute your data, or your apps, efficiently using CouchDB’s incremental replication. CouchDB supports master-master setups with automatic conflict detection. Grab your copy here: http://couchdb.apache.org/ Pre-built packages for Windows and OS X are available. This release comes with a CouchDB manual, hosted directly out of Futon. A PDF version of the manual is also distributed. This is a feature release. These release notes are based on the CHANGES file. HTTP Interface No longer rewrites the X-CouchDB-Requested-Path during recursive calls to the rewriter. Limit recursion depth in the URL rewriter. Defaults to a maximum of 100 invocations but is configurable. Fix _session for IE7. Added Server-Sent Events protocol to db changes API. See http://www.w3.org/TR/eventsource/ for details. Make password hashing synchronous when using the /_config/admins API. Include user name in show/list ETags. Experimental support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). See http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/ for details. Replicator The replicator will use a new server-wide UUID in checkpoint IDs to improve the chances of an efficient resume. Storage System Fixed unnecessary conflict when deleting and creating a document in the same batch. View Server Additional response headers may be varied prior to send(). GetRow() is now side-effect free. Futon Disabled the link to the Futon test suite. These tests were causing problems when run from a browser, and are now available via the CLI instead. Added view request duration to Futon. Disable buttons for actions that the user doesn't have permissions to. Security Passwords are now hashed using the PBKDF2 algorithm with a configurable work factor. Test Suite Moved the JS test suite to the CLI. Improved tracebacks printed by the JS CLI tests. Improved the reliability of a number of tests. UUID Algorithms Added the utc_id algorithm. URL Rewriter & Vhosts Database name is encoded during rewriting (allowing embedded /'s, etc). Reset rewrite counter on new request, avoiding unnecessary request failures due to bogus rewrite limit reports. Build System C/C++ compiler detection has been improved. Autoconf v2.63 is now required if building from Git checkout directly. See DEVELOPERS file for more details. Fixed issue in couchdb script where stopped status returns before process exits. [Less]