It’s been an exciting time here at GeoServer HQ. To explain, let’s start with a little history lesson.

History

In 2009, GeoServer released GeoServer 2.0, sporting a new user interface based on Apache Wicket. Wicket allows Java developers to construct an AJAX UI with minimal HTML experience. Since its adoption, Wicket has made development of GeoServer more accessible, due the ease of creating graphical configuration pages.

The problem is that we’ve still been using Wicket version 1.4 all this time, and the current version is 7. We’ve tried to address this activity at two previous single-day code sprints, which were aborted due to insufficient time and resources. And the longer we’ve waited, the more difficult it has become.

Without an upgrade, we were starting to see less compatibility with modern browsers, which would eventually lead to the UI not being usable. Something needed to be done.

Enter the code sprint

The GeoServer PSC responded to this challenge by contacting sponsors and organizing a code sprint.

This was not a small task. The problem is neatly summed up by a graphic created by Jody Garnett explaining the Wicket upgrade:

Can you see the difference? Neither can we.

As you can see, when properly implemented, the visual change for users will be…nothing at all.

So I was very impressed when we got the go-ahead (and funding!) to meet in Victoria, BC, at the Boundless Canadian office.

What we did

Developers from the US, Canada, Italy, and Belgium descended upon the diminutive capital of British Columbia to spend a week doing the upgrade.

Since we held off this work for so long, it wasn’t as simple as a single upgrade, as we had to negotiate several API changes in one go. And GeoServer, being highly extensible software, has dozens of modules and extensions that needed to be tested too:

And on and on…

Developer experience

Here is the team and their primary accomplishments:

• Andrea Aime (GeoSolutions): Really focused on fixing the build and crushing bugs as they popped up in manual testing. Spent a lot of time migrating the security modules.

• Torben Barsballe (Boundless): Unit test fixes. Component testing. Styling fixes. Fixed links on the Styles page Fixed the Layer Importer. Fixed the LegendGraphic display.

• Niels Charlier (Scitus): Fixed code and unit tests for many of the core components. Manually tested and fixed many commonly used pages in the UI such as the Layer Preview and Tile Caching sections.

• Justin Deoliveira (Voyager Search):  Justin helped out monday-tuesday getting the wicket7 branch to compile and helping everyone learn the tips and tricks of wicket debugging.

• Jody Garnett (Boundless): Learned a lot about how Wicket worked, suffered through manual testing and enjoyed making usability improvements to the configuration pages.

• Jim Hughes (CCRi): Helped with updates to unit tests. Fixed issues identified by testers.

• Morgan Thompson (Boundless): Fixed the CoverageBands panel for raster pages. Tested/upgraded the Stores page. Tested various other pages such as the Security section and NetCDF.

• Devon Tucker (Boundless): Manual testing of core GeoServer and some extensions. Fixed some regressions from the Wicket migrations and did some improvements on the Layers page

And one week later, we are excited to announce that the sprint was a success, and GeoServer is now running Wicket 7. Hooray!

Here is a master nightly build - please download and test it out.

Documentation changes

I was invited to take part in the code sprint, but as I focus on documentation and user experience, I had a lot of down time while the rest of the team was deep in the weeds.

So I took a hard look at the GeoServer User Manual, and performed a fairly significant restructuring, along with some small improvements in the theme.

You can see the new documentation, (compare to an older version). Details on what was done can be found on GitHub. I feel like these changes will make it easier to find information in the documentation, which is fairly extensive.

Documentation Upgrade

More exciting were the visual documentation improvements. I updated the theme of the documentation to increase readability and fix some visual bugs (for example step 10 and higher being cut off).

Documentation Theme and Content Update

Visual Changes and Blue-sky thinking

With so many experienced GeoServer users in the room, we had a short breakout session discussing high-level improvements to the UI and its workflow, in an attempt to answer the question, “what have you always wished the GeoServer UI would do?“ It didn’t take too long to fill up a spreadsheet full of more than two dozen ideas for the next co de sprint- and the team was able to make a few of the easier ones on Thursday and Friday.

The rest of the team decided to follow suit and made a few small visual changes, such as:

• Updating the JAI page (now called “Image Processing”)

• Updating the Coverage Access page (now called “Raster Access”)

• “Add a new resource” is now called “Add a new layer”. (Minuscule change, but this has bugged me for years.)

• Group fields consistently in Global Settings

So I guess we got some visual changes in after all. Hooray again!

Adding Headings and Reorganizing Global Settings

Thanks

Thanks to OSGeo, Boundless, Vivid Solutions, How 2 Map, San Jose Water Company, Transient, GeoBeyond, Scitus, GeoSolutions, CCRi, Astun Technology, and Voyager Search for sponsoring this work.

It’s precisely this kind of support for OSGeo projects that enable our community to thrive.

The GeoServer team is pleased to announce the release of GeoServer 2.8.2. Download bundles are provided (bin, war, dmg and exe) along with documentation and extensions.

GeoServer 2.8.2 is the latest stable release of GeoServer and is recommended for production deployment. This release is made in conjunction with GeoTools 14.2. Thanks to all contributors. Fixes and new functionality include:

• Multiple improvements to Geofence UI.

• Various concurrency and thread-safety fixes.

• WPS and Storied Queries hardening.

Thanks to Jody Garnett (Boundless) and Jim Hughes (CCRi) for this release.

About GeoServer 2.8

Articles, blog posts and presentations:

• State of GeoServer 2015 (FOSS4G)

• XEE Vunerability (GeoServer)

• Remote Execution Vulnerability (GeoServer)

• Z ordering features within and across feature types and layers (User Manual)

• JAI-Ext, the Open Source replacement for Oracle JAI (GeoSolutions)

• Customizable arrow in GeoServer (GeoSolutions)

• PostGIS Curve Support (GeoSolutions)

• Improved NetCDF/GRIB support in GeoServer (GeoSolutions)

• Initial GeoServer 2.8.0 release announcement  (GeoServer)

Follow up to our GeoServer Code Sprint 2016 post - we are all ready to go for next week!

• Monday: Initial migration, Wicket 7 bootcamp / Java 8 bootcamp

• Tuesday: Migration/testing workspace and datastore configuration

• Wednesday: Migration/testing global, service and layer configuration

• Thursday: Migration/testing tile cache, security and demos

• Friday: demos, extensions and select community modules

Mike Pumphrey will be on hand to update the User Guide reference section and ask awkward questions about how things work. We expect to corner a few new volunteers for the scheduled release of GeoServer 2.8.2.

See the OSGeo wiki page for details, sponsors, participants and schedule. For participants (local and remote) there is a pre-flight wiki page with background reading for the upgrade.

Thank you Sponsors

A big thanks to organizations sponsoring the sprint - you help make this gathering possible. Special thanks to the “In-Kind” sponsors sending staff to participate.

Gold Sponsors:

[](http://www.osgeo.org/)    [](http://boundlessgeo.com/)    [](http://www.vividsolutions.com/)

Silver Sponsors:

Bronze Sponsors:

In-Kind Sponsors:

Welcome to Victoria

Thanks to Boundless Victoria for making their offices available (see prep below). We look forward to taking over next week and thanks to everyone for their hospitality.

Victor Olaya has just announced the QGIS GeoServer Explorer plugin which uses the REST API to configure GeoServer.  This plugin serves as a QGIS-based tool to configure and manage GeoServer catalogs, acting as a GUI for GeoServer.

The GeoServer Explorer plugin also wraps up some QGIS functionality making it possible to perform operations that go beyond the capabilities of the REST API and easily perform more complex workflows:

• For instance, uploading a layer in a format not supported by the REST API is done in the same way as uploading a simple shapefile. The plugin will take care of converting its format before uploading, without the user noticing it. Pre-upload hooks can be set up, to process all layers before they are published (for instance, running some topology check or a geometry simplification routine.)

• Styling can be defined in QGIS using its symbology tools and will be converted to SLD when publishing a layer. This allows a layer to be published with the same style as it has when rendered as part of a QGIS project.

The GeoServer Explorer plugin integrates with other QGIS plugins, like the Processing framework. This allows easy automation of tasks such as publishing a set of layers or seeding a GWC layer, and these tasks can also be integrated in workflows using the QGIS Processing Graphical modeler.

QGIS GeoExplorer Plugin

The GeoServer Explorer plugin is available in the QGIS plugins server, and can now be downloaded from within QGIS using the plugin manager.

For developers the source code is available on github (https://github.com/boundlessgeo/qgis-geoserver-plugin), GPL with details on how to contribute.

We would like to thank Victor for his hard work, the community members who encouraged this release, and Boundless for making this plugin available for wider use. We look forward to seeing continued GeoServer and QGIS community collaboration.

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.7.5. Download bundles are provided (zip, war, dmg and exe) along with documentation and extensions.

GeoServer 2.7.5 is a maintenance release of GeoServer recommended for production deployment. Thanks to everyone taking part, submitting fixes including:

Bug [GEOS-4179] - Importer and monitoring REST resources are not thread-safe [GEOS-7116] - Applying a CRS in Importer clears other found CRSes [GEOS-7306] - Stored Queries don’t work on App-Schema layers backed by database [GEOS-7346] - WPS cancelling output stream ends up writing a single byte at a time

For a full list, see the release notes.

The next release, 2.7.6, will mark the planned end of life for this release series. You and your organisation should now consider looking into to the 2.8 release and start testing it now.

Thanks to Ian Turton (Astun Technology) for this release.

This release is made in conjunction with GeoTools 13.5.