Busy times around here. We signed a major deal with a large customer, and are currently trying to spend as much time as possible (which isn't nearly enough) helping to kick-start Forrest, a new xml.apache.org project that will do to the XML ASF community what sourceforge (the site) did for individual open source developers. Forrest is likely to influence the new (and much belated) version of our own website, too. And as a rather nice side-effect, and something we are particularly proud of, one of us got commit-karma at apache.org. Yeah!

Java 1.4 got released. Apart from the obvious importance of this fact, and the Sun servers being slashdotted for that, I'm wondering how all XML projects will be able to live with basic XML infrastructure being bolted-in in this release, if they need features available only in more advanced XML/XSLT engines (I'm thinking Xerces2/Xalan2 here).

Luckily, there is an "Endorsed Standards Override Mechanism" documented on the Sun website, that reminds me however of putting-jars-in-lib\\ext-dirs-practices taught to me as being bad-bad-bad.

Uh oh - it seems to be en vogue to post a link to Stefano's article on Cocoon2 featured on XML.com.

Alexander Schatten announced a Java/Swing-based Xindice database browser to the xindice-dev mailing list. While it is nice to see such GUI tools coming into existence for Xindice, tension sure is arising around the very small group of core kernel commiters (basically only Tom & Kimbro) whether they will be able to support increasing queries and ideas from the community. Hopefully they'll succeed, it is too much of a killer project to fade out because of lack of community/commiter interest.

Transfering the original db:XML codebase to Apache has been pretty slow, too -- as has been the case with the entity resolver stuff of Norman Walsh. Perhaps the ASF should make the technical procedures around new project creation more clear, or enhance the stewardship system.

SOAP is said to be firewall-friendly... This news by itself however is not setting the corporate gates wide-open for this new technology. 

Interesting moves towards solving the remaining issues are to be found in the recent announcement of a v1.0.0 of the XML Apache Security project which implements the related specification work of W3C for signing and encrypting parts of an XML tree.

It has been launched in almost utter silence, but the XML Apache Group now also has a 'commons' project, with various low-level tidbits for XML manipulation. One interesting subproject is the entity resolver, a donation by Sun's Norman Walsh. Check out http://xml.apache.org/commons/.