The GeoServer team has been working away trying to get things ready for our completely stable 1.5.0 release. We’re crossing our fingers that this is the final release candidate, but we want to make sure it’s incredibly solid. So you can help us out a ton by downloading the release and reporting any and all problems. Even small ones, even documentation being a bit off. As we really want to get this out the door we promise that most any real new bug reported will be dealt with incredibly fast.

There have been a number of fixes for this release, we greatly improved error reporting in the GUI with regards to setting up files (shapefiles and rasters), and added a ‘directory datastore’ for easier management.  The two of these greatly improve the work flow for the most common data adding operations.  We’ll try to get the documentation on using this new feature up to date soon, but it should be pretty obvious from the gui. A bug with rotation in image files was fixed, along with multi geometries in in-line features. PostGIS also now has an option to use ‘estimated extents’, for those with huge datasets. And a ‘reflector’ was added to allow defaults for WMS requests, more docs on that soon as well. Also improved were SLD parsing, date handling and logging. If you want to get to the nitty gritty of the bug fixes, the full change log is available.

I personally am really excited about this coming 1.5.0 release, it feels really solid, has a lot of great new code, and really represents a (first) culmination of all the hard work that the Geo-Solutions guys have put in. It’s great to see GeoServer grow in to an even more diverse community. It’s a challenge to deal with all the incoming code at once, but one of those ‘good’ challenges that means there are just lots of big new features coming our way. Look for an Ingestion Engine, WFS versioning, 4d+ Coverages, Complex Features, better Google Earth support, a new UI, and WFS 1.1 all coming online pretty soon. It’s an exciting time.  Shoot, that reminds me, I probably should update the road map again.  I just can’t keep up with all this great work.