Apache moves on traffic server, machine learning projects

The Apache Software Foundation, developer of open source software, on Tuesday is announcing the creation of six Top-Level Projects, including the Apache Traffic Server for caching and Apache Mahout, implementing machine-learning algorithms atop the Apache Hadoop distributed computing platform.

This is the first time Apache has announced six Top-Level Projects at the same time; Top-Level Project status signifies the highest level a project can reach at the organization.

[ See InfoWorld’s report on the recent hack of an Apache project server. ]

Traffic Server is a former commercial project from Yahoo, submitted as an Apache incubator project last year. Suitable for providing edge services in cloud computing, it can serve static content, such as images and JavaScript. Able to process more than 75,000 requests per second, Traffic Server also can route requests for dynamic content to a Web server.

“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,” said ASF chairman Jim Jagielski in a statement released by the foundation.

Mahout, a former Apache sub-project, offers collaborative filtering, clustering, classification, and data mining algorithms.

Other former sub-projects moving to Top-Level status include:

• Tika, which is an embeddable toolkit for content detection and analysis.
• Nutch, a modular Web searching engine.
• Avro, a fast data serialization system.
• HBase, a distributed database modeled after Google’s Bigtable distributed storage system.

HBase and Avro are former subprojects of Hadoop, while Mahoot, Nutch, and Tika formerly were sub-projects of the Lucene search engine effort.

Other Top-Level Projects formed at Apache this year include UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture), providing a framework for analyzing unstructured information; Cassandra, a second-generation “NoSQL” distributed data store; and Click, a Java EE Web application framework.

Apache this year also has accepted the Subversion versioning control system as a Top-Level Project this year, along with Shindig, a container for hosting OpenSocial applications.

This article, “Apache moves on traffic server, machine learning projects,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter and on your mobile device at infoworldmobile.com.