The Apache Software Foundation

The Apache PhotArk team is pleased to announce the release of Apache PhotArk M1-incubating.

Apache PhotArk will be a complete open source photo gallery application including a content repository for the images, a display piece, an access control layer, and upload capabilities. The idea is to have a rigid design for the content repository with a very flexible display piece. The images in the content repository will be protected with granular access control.

PhotArk gallery currently allows you define a set of albums hosted locally, and also allows you to aggregate external albums exposed as feeds (e.g from Flickr or Picassa web) and provides a default web UI for album navigation.

For full details about the release and to download the distributions please go to:

http://incubator.apache.org/photark/downloads.html

Apache PhotArk welcomes your help. Any contribution, including code, testing, contributions to the documentation, or bug reporting is always appreciated. For more information on how to get involved in
Apache PhotArk visit the website at:

http://incubator.apache.org/photark/

Thank you for your interest in Apache PhotArk!

The Apache PhotArk Team.

--
Luciano Resende
http://people.apache.org/~lresende
http://lresende.blogspot.com/

As you know, the ASF turned 10 this year — our celebrations kicked off with cake at ApacheCon Europe this past March. We were thrilled to receive birthday wishes from so many members from the Apache community from across the world.

Our festivities will continue at ApacheCon US (Oakland, California), where we will be holding the Big Feather Birthday Bash and related community events during the conference. We anticipate seeing many of you there!

Some of you are unable to join us in person, but we don't want you to miss out on the fun. As such, we're inviting our global community to "Raise a Glass to Apache" and celebrate this landmark event at your own local gathering. Recognizing Apache developers and users as part of the ASF's 10th Anniversary is very important to us. We want you to join the fun, meet other Apache enthusiasts, make new friends, put faces to the names behind those emails, and, of course, engage in all things Apache.

We understand that communities have their own local culture and preferences: you are welcome to host the type of event best suited to your needs. Preferably, this will take place during the week of ApacheCon (2-6 November, 2009; the Big Feather Birthday Bash is on Wednesday, 4 November) —  your event can be held on any day of that week, at any time of the day or night that is most convenient for you. Events include but are not limited to:

- Social Gatherings – getting together over coffee, lunch, drinks, or dinner
- Tech Talks – individual or industry presentations given about ASF projects and actvities
- Product Demos – showcasing how Apache technologies are powering creative and robust solutions
- Hackathon – collaborating on Apache code bases with ASF Committers
- MeetUps or GetTogethers – featuring talks or presentations on a specific Apache Project or activity
- Networking and Job Match – connecting developers with users, employers with potential hires, clients with contractors/consultants, etc.

Can't wait until ApacheCon? That's OK: we're always up for a celebration, so feel free to get started as soon as you'd like — you can Raise a Glass to Apache at an upcoming conference such as the OpenWorld Forum (Paris), SpringOne 2GX (New Orleans), CPOSC 2009 (Harrisburg, PA), FOSS4G 2009 (Sydney), NLUUG Open Web (Amsterdam), UTOSC 2009 (Sandy, UT), and OSMC 2009 (Nürnberg), among others.

So let's get started! There are three steps to make your event happen:

Step 1: Organize. Decide who will be the host(s)/main point(s) of contact, where the event will be held, the day and time, the format, and any costs.

Step 2: Publicize. Spread the word to your coworkers, the press, and your friends. Post details on your event on blogs, mailing lists, event listings, etc. Drive enthusiasm by discussing the event details to the media and on podcasts. Ask people who will be there to invite other groups who may be interested.

Step 3: Apprise. Share your goodwill with the Apache community. Wish the ASF a happy anniversary on the Foundation blog;  post photos of your event online; and submit a "MyApache" video tribute (can be one or more of the following -- 1-2 minutes describing why you love Apache; 1-2 minutes of your group Raising a Glass to Apache/singing Happy Birthday; 2-5 minutes describing the cool ways you use ASF technologies ... be sure to mention which Apache projects you use as well as your results.)

The important thing is to have fun! Get inspired by checking out the ASF's YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/TheApacheFoundation. "MyApache" submissions received by 2 October (midnight US Pacific time/GMT-8) will receive priority consideration to be featured in the ASF's ApacheWay channel and at the Big Feather Birthday Bash!

A schedule of all confirmed events will be posted on the ApacheCon site. To be included in the list, please send a copy of your invitation (including the date, time, and location) to sk@apache.org. I will send you information on how to add your event in the ApacheCon network, how to submit your "MyApache" tributes, as well as suggestions on how to organize and publicize your event.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. We look forward to hearing from you!

- Sally

Hello Lucene users,

On behalf of the Lucene dev community (a growing community far larger than just the committers) I would like to announce the release of Lucene 2.9.

While we generally try and maintain full backwards compatibility between major versions, Lucene 2.9 has a variety of breaks that are spelled out in the 'Changes in backwards compatibility policy' section
of CHANGES.txt.

We recommend that you recompile your application with Lucene 2.9 rather than attempting to “drop” it in. This will alert you to any issues you may have to fix if you are affected by one of the backward
compatibility breaks. As always, its a really good idea to thoroughly read CHANGES.txt before upgrading.

Lucene 2.9 comes with a bevy of new features, including:

 * Per segment searching and caching (can lead to much faster reopen among other things)

 * Near real-time search capabilities added to IndexWriter

 * New Query types

 * Smarter, more scalable multi-term queries (wildcard, range, etc)

 * A freshly optimized Collector/Scorer API

 * Improved Unicode support and the addition of Collation contrib

 * A new Attribute based TokenStream API

 * A new QueryParser framework in contrib with a core QueryParser replacement impl included.

 * Scoring is now optional when sorting by Field, or using a custom Collector, gaining sizable performance when scores are not required.

 * New analyzers (PersianAnalyzer, ArabicAnalyzer, SmartChineseAnalyzer)

 * New fast-vector-highlighter for large documents

 * Lucene now includes high-performance handling of numeric fields.
   Such fields are indexed with a trie structure, enabling simple to use and much faster numeric range searching without having to externally pre-process numeric values into textual values.

 ---

And many, many more features, bug fixes, optimizations, and various improvements. You can find the full list of changes here:

http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_9_0/changes/Changes.html

Many changes have also occurred in Lucene's Contrib area:

http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_9_0/changes/Contrib-Changes.html

Binary and source distributions are available at
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/java/

Lucene artifacts are also available in the Maven2 repository at
http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/lucene/

The Next Release:

The next release will be Lucene 3.0. This should come along shortly, and will remove all of the deprecated code in Lucene 2.9. Lucene 3.0 will also be the first release to move from Java 1.4 to Java 1.5 as a requirement.

Thanks,

Mark Miller