The GeoServer Project is pleased to announce the release of the third beta of 1.6.0, now available for download.  The main focus of this release has been a number of performance improvements, done by Andrea Aime.  These center around the WMS, and can be seen most clearly on layers that do not have any labels.  Soon we should improve the labeling as well, so keep an eye, since GeoServer is getting legitimately _fast.  _Other improvements include fixes in reprojection in the WFS, with some of the WFS 1.1 work being backported to WFS 1.0.  This allows us to do things like digitize on top of Yahoo! Maps and save the points back to GeoServer, where it automatically puts it in the right projection for the dataset.  The final improvement for beta 3 is our GeoJSON implementation is now part of the standard distribution instead of a separate download.  I for one am excited about this, as it’s about the only coding I’ve done in the past year.

Also, if you’re attending FOSS4G then please find us, we love talking to people who are actually making use of GeoServer.  Many of us will be at TOPP’s booth, and perhaps we will try to pull together a BOF or something.  And of course will be at the workshop and sessions on GeoServer.  See you there!

As many know, GeoServer 1.5.3 was released this past August. Well the numbers are in and it appears that 1.5.3 was warmly welcomed by the masses. August reported a record breaking 10,550 downloads of GeoServer in one month!!

For more information check out the SourceForge statistics over this year which show the August spike. Also of interest are the statistics gathered over the life of the project available here.  Over its lifetime GeoServer has been downloaded over 180,000 times.

So, what can we infer from all this? Well for one thing GeoServer is definitely becoming more and more popular as the months go by. Special thanks to all of our users out there who have helped GeoServer reach this exciting milestone.

The one month countdown to FOSS4G07 has begun. The conference is running from September 24 - 27 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The GeoServer community will be quite active at this years conference with a total of 6 presentations and 1 workshop scheduled! The following is a list of the presentations, be sure to check them out.

• GeoServer and the GeoWeb: KML, GeoRSS, TileCaching and SuperOverlay by Justin Deoliveira, TOPP

• GeoServer, Past, Present and Future by Andrea Aime, TOPP

• Next Generation of Raster Support for the GeoTools-GeoServer Stack by Simone Giannecchini, GeoSolutions

• What’s Going On Out There?: Using GeoServer for Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Environmental Data by Tyler Erickson, Michigan Tech Research Institute

• Geoserver and Open Standards: A Success Story by Saul Farber, Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs

• Managing WMS and WCS multidimensional NetCDF Datasets with Geoserver by Mickael Treguer, IFREMER

Furthermore, there are still seats available for the workshop scheduled for the Monday afternoon. The workshop is titled Introduction to Geospatial Collaboration using GeoServer and is targeted at beginners. However all users are welcome and a number of developers will be on hand to keep advanced users occupied.

We hope to see you there.

We are pleased to announce the release of GeoServer 1.5.3. This version represents the culmination of a ton of hard work to make GeoServer more compatible with the new formats gaining great popularity in the rapidly expanding geo world. Foremost among the improvements is a number of advances in our support for Google Earth. KML, the format understood by Google Earth, has been available from GeoServer for awhile. But our implementation wasn’t flexible enough to make good looking maps and to take advantage of the advanced features of the format. That has all changed, with better default styling, custom placemarks from templates, support for ‘Super-Overlays’ and Time, and automatic generation of legend information. There is also experimental support for referencing an existing cache of tiles to use in a Super-Overlay. The ability to style one’s 2d map and get the same output in Google Earth has also improved dramatically, as it now picks up proper scale elements.

The other big announcement is support for GeoRSS, which allows GeoServer data to also be served on Virtual Earth and Yahoo! Maps. The GeoRSS output can pick up the same pop-up templates as KML, so again you just have to configure your data once and it’s available on a number of different formats. With a bit of coding from Andrea we’re also now shipping with support for the map projection used by Virtual Earth and Google Maps, thanks to SharpGIS and Chris Schmidt.  So now if you use 900913 as the EPSG code for your WMS requests our output will be perfectly overlaid on those maps. The final new web-friendly format is GeoJSON. This is not part of the main distribution yet, but you can download the plug-in, which is easy to add to a GeoServer instance. JSON is a smaller format than GML, and early reports have it coming down faster with less overall size for the same dataset.

The other efficiency improvement is support for paletted images, which allows very quick generation of images like png8 and gif that are much smaller in size than our normal output. This is very useful in situations with low bandwidth, and indeed with tile caching the size of the tiles becomes one of the biggest speed bottlenecks.

The final piece worth mentioning is advances in our Oracle support. Thanks goes to JDi Solutions for funding The Open Planning Project to perform the work. Oracle in GeoServer can now handle full WFS-T transactions against all coordinate reference systems. There have also been a few nice speed improvements with Oracle as well. Thanks to all the users and contributors who helped out with testing and feature suggestions, this project would not be possible without all of you.

Just recently Justin Lokitz of Leica published a new article on Oracle’s Technology Network entitled ‘Integrating Oracle Spatial with Google Earth’.  We were quite pleased to find that instead of telling people how to hand code some scripts for one-off KML his article instead highlighted the capabilities of GeoServer, demonstrating how it can be leveraged to easily connect Oracle Spatial to Google Earth.  He additionally follows up with a post on his blog, containing a few corrections and updates on our latest improvements.  Users of Oracle Spatial will certainly find his information quite helpful.  And it’s great to see articles on GeoServer coming from all sorts of different perspectives, aimed at different audiences.  If you’ve got an urge to write about GeoServer let us know and we’re more than happy to promote it and to find venues to publish in.