The Apache Software Foundation has <A HREF="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1745306,00.asp">shut down the Avalon project.</A> Foundation officials said that the Avalon 4.x framework will now be housed inside a new open-source project called Excalibur. Excalibur, one of four sub-projects that grew out of Avalon, is working on a lightweight, embeddable IoC (Inversion of Control) container named Fortress that is written in Java.