Citing inactivity on the project, the Apache Software Foundation has retired the open source Apache Excalibur project, which provided a Java Inversion of Control container and reusable components, Apache said on Friday.
Excalibur featured a Java-based, lightweight, embeddable Inversion of Control container named Fortress as well as components for activities like caching and XML handling. With Inversion of Control, developers instruct a software-based container to tell components how to interact in an application.
“We do not know of any natural successors or potential forks for Excalibur, but there are alternatives like Apache Felix or Apache Aries,” said Carsten Ziegeler, on behalf of the Apache Attic and the Excalibur project. “Retiring a project is not as simple as turning everything off, as existing users need to both know that the project is retiring and retain access to the necessary information for their own development efforts.”
Felix offers an OSGi-based services platform, while Aries features pluggable Java components enabling an enterprise OSGi application programming model. Excalibur actually moved to the Apache Attic, for end-of-life projects, in December. The user mailing list for Excalibur remains open, while other resources, including the website, Wikis, downloads, and bug tracker, will remain in a read-only state.