Six new Top-Level Projects at the Apache Software Foundation

Six projects have been promoted to the Apache Software Foundation's "Top-Level Project" status. Becoming a Top-Level Project means that the Foundation fully endorses and supports the project's development. ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski said "Becoming a Top-Level Project is a vote of confidence from the Foundation at-large, demonstrating a project has proven its ability to be properly self-governed".

One of the six, Apache Traffic Server, a high performance HTTP/1.1 caching proxy server, was contributed to the Apache Incubator in November 2009 by Yahoo!, while the other five, Mahout, Tika, Nutch, Avro and HBase, are former sub-projects of existing Top-Level Projects, now independent of their parent projects.

Mahout, a Hadoop based implementation of machine learning algorithms, HBase, a distributed database modelled after Google's BigTable and Avro, a fast data serialisation system, were sub-projects of the Apache Hadoop project. Tika, a lightweight content detection system, and Nutch, a modular web search engine, were both sub-projects of the Apache Lucene project.

The Foundation also noted the five other Top-Level Projects that have been created so far in 2010; Apache UIMA, an unstructured data analysis system, Apache Cassandra, the "NoSQL" distributed data store, Apache Subversion, the version control system, Apache Click, a Java EE Web application framework, and Apache Shindig, an OpenSocial container, have all moved to the upper tier of the Foundation's projects this year.

(djwm)