Is Apache commons an active project? Is there a public roadmap?

Question

Does anybody know if Apache Commons is under active development? It seems to me like it requires a serious refresh. I cannot find any roadmap referencing a newer version.

Answer 1

Apache Commons per se is not a single project, but a collection of various small projects which perform some isolated functionality, see http://commons.apache.org/ for the current list and the official description of the project.

Many of these projects are active, e.g. commons-lang, commons-io, commons-exec, commons-mail.

Additionally there are some projects which are listed under "sandbox", these are projects that are not mature enough yet and there is a list of "dormant" projects, which are not actively developed any more.

So in fact the actual answer depends on the actual project under apache-commons which you are looking at. Most of these projects handle feature requests/discussions on JIRA (https://issues.apache.org/jira/) and might have some release-plan being posted there, however you will probably get the most authorative answer by posting to the mailing lists that each of these projects maintains.

Answer 2

Yes they are, take a look at this roadmap from commons-lang:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LANG?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:roadmap-panel