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The Apache Attic

attic.apache.org

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Anyone looking for Apache Mesos in the list of Apache Attic projects, news of its demise appears to have been greatly exaggerated: The decision to retire the project seems to have been canceled: [1]

[1] https://lists.apache.org/x/thread.html/rf0359da13d1c3baff882...

Yep. The vote on this was cancelled https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26748191

Fun fact: when I started contributing to Apache httpd in the 1990s, it was hosted on CVS; when you delete a file in CVS, its revision history ,v file in the repository is moved into a subdirectory called Attic. You can see Attic directories in NetBSD’s cvsweb, eg. http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/ (but not in OpenBSD’s repository for some reason?)

Can't wait when Apache OpenOffice finally takes its place in the Attic.

And it's a shame. OpenOffice should retire and forward all their SEO ranking to LibreOffice.

I'm feeling nostalgic. Anyone who has developed something for the internet in the early 2000s for sure have downloaded something from Apache website (e.g. Apache httpd which most people simply call "Apache", and Tomcat). Many products in the Attic were born during the golden age of Java.

Because I used Java extensively around 2001, then not till 2020, I paid no attention in the interim. It seems like it had an early golden age, then a middle ages in which horrors like Spring were born to compensate for the stagnation, and is enjoying a resurgence or renaissance now with Scala / Clojure / Kotlin / Java16 ?

I worked with Java from 2009 until now. I can't account for the 01-09 timespan, but I'd say the big gap between say java 1.5 and 1.8 was less about stagnation and more about letting other languages feel things out. I like that Java is never too far ahead or too far behind.

I do think the "hip" side of tech has started to warm back up to Java, both as the language adopts some of the niceties that python/ruby/kotlin/scala/etc have shown are quite ergonomic and also as the community, I think, warms back up to the idea that static typing can be net helpful and that maybe a good JIT compiler is nice too.

That's some solid historical revisionism is action here :-)

That period you mention was definitely due to stagnation, on Sun's part. It wasn't "watch the pioneers as the crash and burn and pick the good parts". It was "we're stuck".

That's probably fair. I was in high school during that period. I've mostly only ever known the Java owned by Oracle, where it seemed... reasonably kept? Java 8 happened under Oracle, after all.

Compare this list to https://projects.apache.org/projects.html, I think it's missing a few (they may not be officially dead, I suppose).

Surprised to see iBATIS. Wasn't it a strong competitor to Hibernate once?

Forked by dev team as MyBatis.

It's a different approach to Hibernate, but has similar ends. We recommended it for teams who were comfortable with writing SQL directly.

Now, it is MyBatis: https://mybatis.org/mybatis-3/

with other forks https://github.com/baomidou/mybatis-plus

If you want to compose your SQL queries, it is excellent.

Can vouch for it, it is my favourite option on the Java side, no need to try track down ORMs performance issues.

It is still alive and very active but is now called MyBatis.

https://blog.mybatis.org/p/about.html

Kinda surprised that XML is officially retired, since it's still in use for a lot of enterprise APIs.

You likely already know this, but for the sake of those reading: XML itself is still alive and well, what's retired is the "Apache XML Project," a collection of XML-related software.

Oh I actually didn't realize that. I thought it meant that XML itself was deprecated, but just still in use. Thanks for clarifying.

It's even less momentous than that: "Apache XML Project" was a banner under which several different tools lived. Some of those tools have gone on to have their own lives and live on elsewhere.

XML is a standard like HTML.

Actually, according to the linked project page [1] only the "umbrella" XML project had been decomissioned; the only actual subpackages retired are axkit and xindice (never really used or even heard of those). Xerces, which as Xerces/J is a major part of Java's XML stack, and all the other subprojects have just migrated into standalone projects, including even XMLBeans which was resurrected on request of Apache's POI project for reading/creating MS Office files.

[1]: http://archive.apache.org/dist/xml/

I really liked the Apache Click framework for building websites. I seemed so natural using it

Click was nice. A lot of the newer JS frameworks are basically client side replicas of it.

I believe Wicket is somewhat similar (and still actively developed).

https://wicket.apache.org/

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