Being social and sharing with others is one of the keystones of a open source community.

Traditionally open source communities thrive on mailing lists and IRC channels, however it’s not news that many people prefer other medias for sharing thoughts, experiences, and asking for help. For example, people with an interest in GeoServer are already active on Twitter and StackExchange.

Simone recently created a new Google+ GeoServer community, adding one more choice to the mix: https://plus.google.com/communities/101905665894825745986

If you like mailing lists do not worry, the GeoServer users mailing list will still be the primary and official mean to get support (and we very much suggest you to hang there too), the Google+ community is just an alternate mean of communication that some of us might want to try out.

So, if have an interest in GeoServer and your preferred media is Google+ hop on, if we see there is enough interest we might start doing hangouts and public presentations to leverage this social platform extra features.

If you are looking for GeoServer training, save the date: GeoSolutions will be providing a two days long introduction to GeoServer 6/7 June 2013 in Milan.

The training will be held in Italian by GeoServer core contributors, and will cover a basic introduction to GeoServer, setting up vector and raster data, basic and advanced SLD styling, raster data tuning, integration with Google Earth, tile caching with the integrated GeoWebCache, delivering and filtering vector data with WFS, security, integration with the rest interface and setting up for production. The experience will be hands on, with one computer per participant, with discounts for university students.

If you are interested but cannot make it, or would like to get training in another language, go have a look at the GeoServer training page to find more training opportunities.

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.3.1, now available for download.

This is the first bug-fix release of the 2.3.x stable series, and packs 34 changes between bug fixes and improvements in different departments. Here is an highlight:

• The XSLT output format generator module graduated from community to official extension (work performed GeoSolutions Andrea Aime with sponsorship from the City of Wien)

• A couple of changes in the SQL Server data increase performance, provided you enable the relevant flags. One is the ability to transfer geometries in SQL Server native format, as opposed to using WKB, which avoids the slow WKB generation routines included in SQL Server, the other allows to disable native paging, which can sometimes lead the SQL Server query planner to create bad data access plans (GEOS-5750 and GEOS-5314). The native geometry serialization was sponsored by Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management and performed by Bouvet, thanks to Stewart Loving-Gibbard for the paging patch.

• A new flag has been added to prevent the resolution of XML external entities (normally enabled by default in XML parsers), which can be used to prevent some kinds of XML attacks (GEOS-5273 and GEOS-5314). The work was performed by GeoSolution under sponsorship from the City of Wien.

• Some SLD related fixes (GEOS-4214, GEOS-5767) (thanks to GeoSolutions’s Andrea and Carlo for those)

• A bunch of improvements in the monitoring extension (GEOS-5725, GEOS-5732, GEOS-5758 and GEOS-5766) (thanks to OpenGeo’s Justin Deoliveria and Ian Schneider for those, plus one from Andrea)

• Fixed an issue that prevented GeoServer from serving back GetMap requests under Windows when using the JRE (GEOS-5768) (thanks goes to GeoSolutions’ Simone for this one)

• GWC will now respect the layer HTTP caching settings, and a memory leak has been fixed in respect to the WFS-T integration (GEOS-5686, GEOS-5659)  (thanks’ to OpenGeo’s Ian Schneider for these)

• The German translation maintainers fixed an encoding problem which resulted in weird chars appearing in the GeoServer UI (GEOS-5641) (thanks goes to Frank Gasdorf and Oskar Fonts for their continuous work on UI internationalization)

• GeoServer UI is completely available in Dutch, German **_and _Korean **(thanks goes to Wouter van Nifterick, Frank Gasdorf, Stefan Engelhardt, Minpa Lee and others), feel free to review and contribute at Transifex.com

• Finally, a few fixes and improvements in the security subsystem (GEOS-5698, GEOS-5751, GEOS-5753, GEOS-5783) (thanks to Christian Mueller for his continuous work on the security subsystem)

And there is more, you can find everything in the GeoServer release notes. Also, looking at the corresponding GeoTools 9.1 release notes we can find some extra goodies:

• Improved support for sparse shapefiles (GEOT-2791) (thanks to Dieter DePaepe)

• Added support for UUID data type in PostGis data stores (GEOT-4414) (thanks to Shane StClair)

Download GeoServer 2.3.1, try it out, and provide feedback on the GeoServer mailing list.

Thanks again for using GeoServer!

The GeoServer community is very happy to announce that Packt Publishing has published a GeoServer book! At 350 pages, the GeoServer Beginner’s Guide provides a great introduction to GeoServer for those not yet versed in the field of web mapping.

A published book is a big milestone for any open source project and the GeoServer team is very excited. Congratulations to Packt and authors Stefano Iacovella and Brian Youngblood for a job well done!

Finally Packt has generously made a few discount codes available.

• The code “Geoserverprint@25%off” can be used to obtain a 25% discount on print copies

• The code “GeoservereBook@50%off” can be used to obtain a 50% discount on the eBook version

The discount codes are valid until May 31 and require an account on the Packt website. To use the codes one must:

• Log into the account

• Add the desired book(s) to the shopping cart

• Enter the discount code on the shopping cart page

Thanks again to Packt. Enjoy the book!

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.3.0, available for download.

This release contains six months worth of improvements and fixes to the GeoServer code base. Including several important new features and improvements such as:

• A pluggable configuration subsystem (for the catalog and service configuration)

• GeoWebCache clustering and disk quota improvements

• More powerful layer groups and better control of the WMS capabilities layer tree

• Several security subsystem improvements

• WPS process whitelist (control which processes your WPS is exposing)

• WMS dimensions support improvements (units, custom dimensions)

• JSON and JSONP output format support in many OGC operations

• The monitoring module finally graduating to official extension

• Raster re-projection quality improvements and speedups

• INSPIRE module improvements for the WFS protocol

• A newfound ability to catalogue all components of GeoServer via a REST API

For those daring enough to try out nightly builds the 2.3.x series also offers a new scripting extension allowing you to write WPS processes and small applications in your preferred scripting language. Also included as a nightly community module available is a complete WCS 2.0 service implementation.

More information about the new features of the 2.3.x stream can be found in the  GeoServer 2.3-beta release announcement.

The good news do not stop there. GeoServer has finally completed the OSGeo incubation and it’s now an official OSGeo project. Many thanks to all that participated, in particular Jody Garnett for constantly pushing forward, Landon Blake for mentoring us, and all the people that participated to the FOSS4G-AU code sprint in which all of the grunt work of provenance review was done. We want to thank in particular Jody Garnett, Adam Brown, Karin Stronkhorst, Luca Morandini and Joshua Vote for the hard work.

And last but not least there have been some bug fixes since the RC1 release, you can find a full list in the GeoServer 2.3.0 changelog. Included in this list, for those willing to try out nightly builds, is a new fast WMS JPEG encoder based on libjpeg-turbo which should give a nice boost to your raster data serving.

Download GeoServer 2.3, try it out, and provide feedback on the GeoServer mailing list.  As with any new version, be sure to backup your data directory before upgrading.

Thanks again for using GeoServer!

Download GeoServer 2.3