Just a quick note, which I’m putting in the ‘Tips and Tricks’ category, since it’s a trick to get quick feedback from the GeoServer community.  For many years the core GeoServer developers were not good at maintaining a consistent presence on IRC, which is used heavily in many open source projects.  We’d run meetings there, of course, but would not usually be on unless there was a specific meeting.t

In the past few months we’ve been getting a lot better, and are starting to get a group of people who are generally present on IRC.  For more details on how to get on IRC see the IRC section of our docs.  It also has information on the weekly meeting, which everyone is welcome to take part in.  So please, come join us and let us know what you’re doing and wanting to do with GeoServer.

With the recent release of GeoServer-1.5.1, the GeoServer ArcSDE Extension has gained the ability to serve ArcSDE raster datasets, as well as the vector datasets it’s been serving so far.

Detailed instructions can be found on the GeoServer ArcSDE Plugin page, and if any crack coders out there want to see support for more ArcSDE raster formats (other than the 3/4-band unsigned byte format we currently support) then help us get coding!

If you’re itching to see an example in action, check out this map or this map.

Happy rasters!

The GeoServer team is pleased to announce the latest release in the stable 1.5.x series. It’s great to see GeoServer settling to be a really mature project, as most of the changes done for 1.5.1 were actually improvements instead of bug fixes. The big change is that we’re shipping with OpenLayers as our default preview and demo application. And we took a bit of extra time to get GeoServer producing tiles with nice labels by borrowing ‘metaTile’ ideas from TileCache, creating them on the fly and in memory. This summer we’ve got a Google Summer of Code project to work on Tile Caching, so soon those tiles will be cached to disk (and distributed about) as well.

The other fun OpenLayers improvement we’ve got is making it available as an output format. So instead of

[http://server.org/geoserver/wms?bbox=-13....&Format=image/png](http://localhost:8080/geoserver/wms?bbox=-130,24,-66,50&styles=&request=GetMap&layers=topp:states&width=550&height=250&srs=EPSG:4326&Format=image/png)

You can do

[http://server.org/geoserver/wms?bbox=-13...&Format=application/openlayers](http://localhost:8080/geoserver/wms?bbox=-130,24,-66,50&styles=&request=GetMap&layers=topp:states&width=550&height=250&srs=EPSG:4326&Format=application/openlayers)

and you’ll get an interactive OpenLayers map instead of a mere png image. Just put Format=application/openlayers on any WMS request and we’ll make an OpenLayers map with it, changing the default parameters as you pass them in.

And if putting in all those WMS values in is too much for you, we’ve now got a WMS reflector that makes some guesses as to reasonable defaults. So you can do:

[http://localhost:8080/geoserver/wms/reflect?layers=topp:states ](http://localhost:8080/geoserver/wms/reflect?layers=topp:states)

The defaults aren’t ideal yet, we’re hoping to improve them for the next release to be able to derive more defaults, like take in to account the bbox of the dataset.

Past OpenLayers we’ve got a lot of nice KML improvements. First up we’ve got templates, see the new tutorial on this great feature. We’ve leveraged the great FreeMarker templating library to give users incredibly powerful control over the output of KML pop-ups. Soon we’ll also make this available to GetFeatureInfo and GeoRSS as well. Our old pop-ups would just dump attribute information, now users can make use of KML’s html features and link in content using the information stored in their geospatial data.

Other KML improvements include our first crack at SuperOverlays, which are easily one of the most powerful features in Google Earth. We’ve taken most all the complexity out of them, allowing users to just configure their layers in GeoServer and we’ll automatically do the super overlay. Right now GeoServer generates all data on the fly, but soon we should have a few caching options. We also have a few other small improvements for KML, like picking up point icons from SLD, a param to add a Legend to Google Earth, and cleaning our output up so it works with Google Maps better.

We’ve also had some great contributions this release. Saul Farber of MassGIS has his ArcSDE raster support in pretty good shape, and is looking for users to test it out and give feedback. If anyone gets it going with Google Earth Superoverlays do let us know. More details will be on this blog soon. The other nice contributions were translations of the web admin console to Chinese and Portuguese, adding to Spanish, German, Japanese, and French.

Please give us feedback on this release, especially on documentation and the KML improvements. We’re looking to do a big press release for the next release to highlight the recent work, and hopefully pick up some new users, so want to be sure everything is really tight.

As many may know GeoServer is one of the many open source projects involved in this years Google Summer of Code initiative. We are very pleased to announce that two GeoServer based projects were accepted and would like to congratulate those students who submitted proposals on a job well done.

Christopher Whitney will be working on a Java port of the popular TileCache library written in Python. This is an exciting project for GeoServer as the topic of tile caching has become a very hot one these days. A port of TileCache to Java will allow for tight integration of a tile cache directly into GeoServer so tile caching can be acheived out of the box without the need to set up an external tiling server.

Anthony Manfredi will be creating a style editor for GeoServer which will allow users to directly edit SLD documents from the GeoServer web interface. A styling component directly integrated into the web ui is something everyone has wanted for quite some time and will a long way in terms of usability.

So a warm welcome to the community for both Christopher and Anthony, we look forward to having you with us this summer!

Geoserver 1.5.1-rc1 has been released, and can be downloaded from SourceForge.

This release contains a number of interesting new features such as:

• Chinese translation

• Portuguese translation

• OpenLayers map preview (replaces the MapBuider previews)

• KML legend support

• KML superoverlay / region support

• Multiple base map layers can now be configured

• Support for CRS with units other than meters is back

And as always numerous bug fixes. The entire issue log can be found here on our Jira issue tracker.

We’d like to release this one as stable soon. Please test it, and let us know if you spot any significant regression.