Somewhat delayed news, but just to say that a couple of months ago (Oct 17 2012, to be precise), the Apache board approved the resolution to establish Isis as a top-level project.

This is a big deal. The Apache Software Foundation is all about establishing viable open source communities with software developed “out in the open”, and with squeaky clean intellectual property. The reason Apache has an incubator is to ensure that these principles are followed.

So, after a couple of years in the incubator and having demonstrated that we understood “the Apache Way”, our mentors recommended that Isis was ready for graduation; the incubator approved the graduation and so, in turn, did the ASF’s board.

Every Apache top-level project has a project management committer (PMC) and a chair; yours truly is the first PMC chair of Apache Isis TLP.

What this also means is that we have a new website, http://isis.apache.org. But we haven’t just moved our old (Maven-generated) content over from our old incubator website, instead we’ve moved onto Apache’s CMS infrastructure. The benefit of this is that we can maintain and update the site much more readily; behind the scenes we just write in markdown, and the ASF tools render it down into HTML. Much of the material on our old site in the incubator is now up on the new site, and we’re continuing to add more new material all the time.

I’ve a few more big pieces of news, but I’ll leave them for subsequent posts.