Today marks the one year anniversary of CXF coming to Apache. One year ago today, Jason van Zyl sent the first “Welcome” mail to this list.
It’s probably a good time to think back over the last year and see what we’ve accomplished.
First off: releases – we managed to produce 2 milestone releases along with a full blown release. The process to release the first patch has started. That’s not too bad. Moreover, the groundwork is now laid which should allow us to produce releases more quickly and easily which should allow us to be more agile and respond to users needs.
The 2.0 Release is the first (and at this point, only) Apache Licensed, Standalone Certified, JAX-WS implementation. That’s a huge accomplishment. That was the major bullet item on the incubator proposal, and we accomplished it.
We also are integrated into Geronimo as an option for the JAX-WS implementation there. When they ship 2.0, the user will be able to chose CXF for JAX-WS. Geronimo certified FIRST with CXF. That speaks highly of the CXF community and it’s ability to work well with the Apache Geronimo community. Other J2EE vendors are also looking at CXF to provide the JAX-WS implementation.
User base: with the full 2.0 release in the beginning of July, we’ve definitely seen a spike in users looking at CXF and, more importantly, using it and migrating applications to it. If you look at the archives of our user list, the July post count was nearly tripple the max of any previous month. (email overload.) In less than one month, we’ve had almost 6000 downloads of the 2.0 release, and that doesn’t count the people that would use maven and grab it that way. This is an exciting time as people start using CXF in ways the developers never imagined, stretching limits, etc…
Community: The CXF community is quite active. The dev list constantly has discussions going on, people participating, etc… If you look at our stats on Ohloh, over the last year, 22 developers have contributed code. Ohloh considers that a large community. (Note to devs: Ohloh warns “Few source code comments”. We need to work on that.) Doing some stats on logs, over the last 6 months, every month has had at least 10 unique commiters contributing code. The funniest Ohloh stat: 190,825 LOC, Effort: 49 person years, Value: $2,687,418. 22 people did 49 Person years of work in one year. Nice job. Anyone feeling underpaid?
We’ve added 4 new commiters, and with the increase in activity due to the release, several others are “getting close”. The extra eyes and hands have helped make CXF a much better product and meet more needs than we could have done without them.
Also, who can forget: we changed our name. The impossible to type CeltiXfire was replace with the simple CXF name.
Anyway, the past year has been extremely exciting to me. We’ve accomplished a LOT in a very little amount of time. We’ve had our ups and downs. Any new community at Apache has it’s “learning experiences,” but we got through them as a community and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what the next year will bring.