The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.5.3. Download bundles are provided (zip, war, dmg and exe)  along with documentation and extensions.

GeoServer 2.5.3 is the next the stable release of GeoServer and is recommended for production deployment. Thanks to everyone taking part, submitting fixes and new functionality:

• A new process, PagedUnique, to efficiently grab large amounts of unique values from a layer column

• Legend preview functionality in the style editor

• A long awaited fix for poor font rendering when creating transparent map

• Some fixes in WFS 2.0 joins

• GeoJSON CRS syntax has been updated to the current valid one (we were using a old legacy one)

• Some GetFeatureInfo further fixes for complex styles

• Fix scale computation when the CRS unit of measure is not meters

• Some WMS 1.3 rendering fixes with image mosaics

• Avoid invalid reports of leaked connections when using SHAPE-ZIP output format against SQL views whose SQL is no more valid

• Check the release notes for more details

• This release is made in conjunction with GeoTools 11.3

About GeoServer 2.5

Articles and resources for GeoServer 2.5 series:

• GeoServer now supports Vector Footprints for ImageMosaic

• Harvesting Metadata using CSW

• Caveats in GeoServer JNDI configuration

• Supporting Wind Barbs In GeoServer and GeoTools

• Deterministic rendering order in SLDs

• Secure GeoServer connections to Postgres for Heroku

• Labelling a MultiPoint geometry with WPS

• GeoServer 2.5-beta announcement reviews key features of this release:

  • WCS 2.0 and WCS 2.0 Earth Observation have been added (thanks to DLR and Eumesat for funding this)

  • The addition of a batch importer to making setting up GeoServer easier (thanks to MapStory).

  • High performance PNG encoder based on PNGJ library (Andrea Aime). Improved JPEG performance using libjpegturbo available as an optional extension (Simone Giannecchini and Daniele Romagnoli)

  • Use of ST_Simplify to improve PostGIS rendering performance (a collaboration with Andrea and Jonathan Moules).

  • New implementation of GetFeatureInfo that takes into account symbol shapes, offsets, and dynamic line widths into account (thanks to Eskilstuna municipality for funding this).

• Using GeoServer at IGN to create new digital maps is an impressive look at advanced styling deployed by the french mapping agency

• Labelling a MultiPoint geometry with WPS (Boundless) is a good example of integrating WPS and Styling

• Achieving extreme GeoServer Scalability with new Marlin vector rasterizer (GeoSolutions) shows an exciting JRE extension that can be used for improved performance. If you are using GeoServer with a large number of CPU cores you owe yourself an hour to try this out.

• DXF output format promoted to official extension for GeoServer (GeoSolutions)

• Active Directory based security in GeoServer through LDAP (GeoSolutions)