GeoServer Blog

GeoServer FOSS4G 2013

Oct 2, 2013 • geoserver

The GeoServer community was out in force at FOSS4G.

GeoServer Workshops

GeoServer was well represented at a range of workshops:

  • W17: A complete open source web mapping stack (Introduction to the OpenGeo Suite): Jeffrey Johnson (Boundless)

  • W18: Introduction to Mobile Web Development Using FOSS4G: Krisztian Olle (Envitia)

  • W5: OGC services with GeoServer: from journeyman to master: Andrea Aime (GeoSolutions), Simone Giannecchini (GeoSolutions)

  • W19: Introduction To High Availability Clusters With GeoServer And GeoWebCache: Simone Giannecchini (GeoSolutions S.A.S.)

  • W20: SpatioTemporal Data Handling With GeoServer: An Introduction With Examples For MetOc And Remote Sensing Data For WMS And WCS: Simone Giannecchini (GeoSolutions S.A.S.)

  • W23: WPS With GeoServer: Tom Kunicki (Boundless)

Highlights, Notes and Quotes:

  • Andrea talking off the cuff for 30 mins (with Jody offering live whiteboard slides) while waiting for the overhead projector to be fixed.

  • Workshops are the highlight of foss4g!

GeoServer Presentations

We had a strong GeoServer thread on the second day, and a smattering of coverage throughout the conference.

The big news was the live release of GeoServer 2.4.0 during the State of GeoServer presentation. Thanks to Andrea and Jody for representing the team with an entertaining, if fast paced, presentation.

A quick shout out to elgeo and locationtech for capturing both the slides and recording the sessions from FOSS4G 2013.

Highlights, Notes and Quotes:

  • Members of the audience performing a GeoServer cloud deploy while waiting for the State of GeoServer talk

  • Q: When is 2.4.0 being released

  • A: Now!

  • Q: What are your plans for GeoServer 3 A: We would only make a GeoServer 3 if we have to break backwards compatibility. The team is doing an excellent job and I hope, for our customers, that we are never forced to make a GeoServer 3.0 release.

  • Q: Who is  is that person with Andrea? A project manager or something? A: ….

Code Sprint

Niels, in addition to being charming, was the force behind this years GeoServer code sprint.

As per ourinterview with Frank translation has been a great community priority. One of the steps to getting the imported module ready for use as an extension is to make sure it is ready to be translated. Niels had just finished the CSW admin page and hit the ground running. With a bit of help from Ian Turton, the team was able to get a pull request done during the code sprint.

One of the best ways to thank the code sprint team is to dive in and translate this new functionality, and sure enough when I checked this work is quickly getting done.

Thanks Niels, Ian and crew! I hope to see more GeoServer developers at FOSS4G Portland!

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GeoServer 2.4 Released!

Sep 20, 2013 • geoserver

The GeoServer team is pleased to announce the final release of GeoServer 2.4.0. Some great final bug fixes reported from 2.4-RC2 made it into this release. Check out the change log for the details. More Information about the new and noteworthy of the GeoServer 2.4 series can be found here.

Its worth to announce that GeoServer is available in for more languages: Spanish, French, Polish and Romanian. Many thanks to Jorge Sanz, Alexandre Gacon, Jaros?aw P?kal and Sorin C?linic? for their contributions. Again, feel free to join a translation team and review existing translations at Transifex.

A special thank you to those who helped test all the beta and release candidates.

Download the new release, try it out, and be sure to report any issues found in the bug tracker or on the mailing list. Thanks for using GeoServer!

About the GeoServer 2.4 series

The following change control requests were completed during the development of GeoServer 2.4:

Articles and blogs during GeoServer 2.4 development:

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GeoServer 2.4-RC2 released

Sep 3, 2013 • geoserver

GeoServer team is pleased to announce the release of GeoServer 2.4-RC2 with a few last minute additions:

  • Catalog Service Web has graduated to a formal Extension, including new admin page and many fixes

  • A fix for those using Tomcat Apache Portable Runtime

  • Removal of the VPF Extension

  • See the GeoServer 2.4-RC2 release notes for more details

This is our last shot before FOSS4G so we really need to call out to our great community and ask for your assistance with testing. There are two aspects where your your help is vital:

  • Our developers are not in position to test on every platform, so if we need to ask for assistance testing in strange environments (like Windows or WildFly)

  • In a similar fashion the developers tend to play with a few specific sample datasets which have been donated to the project for this purpose. If you can test with your own data and confirm everything works as expected it will save us both any surprises

To quickly report back success, drop a message on twitter with the #GeoServer tag!

If you discover any issue, please let us know using the bug tracker (Use xircles to set up a CodeHaus login).

About the GeoServer 2.4 series

The following change control requests were completed during the development of GeoServer 2.4:

Articles and blogs during GeoServer 2.4 development:

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GeoServer Translation Interview with Frank Gasdorf

Sep 3, 2013 • geoserver

Here is an unusual post for the GeoServer blog - an interview! We have been asking Frank Gasdorf to write a blog post, to thank all the amazing translators, for some time. Finally in an act of desperation Jody managed to hunt him down on Skype for a few questions on how GeoServer translation works and how you can get involved.

Q: So frank I am used to working with you on uDig or the Live DVD. When did you start with GeoServer?

Let me try to answer. My first contact with all these open source projects was in 2008 - with uDig as I used to use at work as a platform for our GIS system.

uDig is a desktop application with uses OGC services (WFS, WMS and whatever) therefore we needed to use GeoServer and MapServer. And we chose GeoServer as we were familiar with the GeoTools library.

Q: When did you start getting involved as a committer with GeoServer?

Around about two years ago, I have no idea maybe we can check. I think it was about Wicket and the UI and some missing externalized strings - so we can translate it into German.

Q: Ah so you started out with GeoServer and translation from the get go.

Yes. GeoServer was still using subversion, and we requested commit access. We had to show were familiar with GeoServer build, issue tracker and so on.

Q: Was that difficult?

Not really, always had a guiding hand from the mailing list, committers and my questions were answered quickly.

Q: I want to ask you about all the amazing translation work you have set up, every release seems to have more languages coming on board. How do you do it?

We had several stages of success. First part everything was about finding an easy-to-use crowd platform for translations with support to synchronize from and back to the core code base. The second step was about setting up the environment for several resources identified as translatable UI elements. And finally we initially set up languages teams everybody can join after approval.

While posting the progress on Twitter, Google+ GeoServer Community or massages on the Mailing-list the community of translators has grown rapidly from few translators during 2.1.x release cycles to currently around 80 for release train 2.4.x.

We started with the GeoServer 2.1 with 15 resources and set up the main languages and some others already existed from other translation platforms or in source repository of GeoServer.

Now GeoServer is up to 25 translations, with a total of 25 resources to translate.

Q: Hold on what is a resource you are going too fast.

A resource is like a text file, where the developers have separated out all the human readable text from the applications user interface. Like dialogs, table headers and forms.

Here is an example from the web-wms module:

<code><small>AbstractStylePage.confirmOverwrite = Really want to overwrite the current editor contents?
AbstractStylePage.copy             = Copy ...
AbstractStylePage.copyFrom         = Copy from existing style
</small></code>

Q: In each release you have been showing these great graphs illustrating the progress translating into different languages. Where are those from?

The screens are taken from the Transifex platform, which you can see at the following link:

https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/geoserver_stable

The content is stored in the cloud and the platform allows you to host translations for open source projects for free. Different plans for commercial and open source projects.

As long as these projects are publicly accessible, and the core project is open source, the service is free.

Q: Can you show me what translating looks like?

Well you can probably login with Facebook or other social accounts. Have a look.

Q: Yeah that worked (it did Twitter, Google, Facebook) and I can now go in and view the French translation.

That is it - the translation screen is similar, but you would be allowed edit the string.

To edit you have to request to join the organization, when you have joined there is different roles: Administrator, Translator and Reviewer.

Q: So how do people contact you to help out translating GeoServer?

There are two different ways people join:

  1. For existing languages they can join a translation team, for e.g. Italian

  2. If a translation team does not exist yet they request a new language team for GeoServer project.

This month Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese teams were set up!

Q: Wow that is amazing, do they have to sign a code license agreement like code committers, or are you putting this in on their behalf?

Right now we team up with GeoServer committers to bring the translations back to the code base. The Transifex platform has a nice feature for CLA agreements. Once users request to join a Team, they have to accept the CLA. Only who accepted the CONTRIBUTOR ASSIGNMENT AGREEMENT_ _ is allowed to edit.

Q: Is this the same technology you use for the Live DVD?

Not yet, but we are considering it. Actually there isn’t any support for Restructured Text available at the moment.

Q: How are the translations being received by the community? We obviously do not get a lot of feedback on geoserver-devel which is an english email list.

The developers can mostly speak English and prefer to work with GeoServer in English. In the emerging world users only speak their own language and therefore they have no access of open source projects or capabilities. If it is not translated it is not usable. Another hurdle may be the lack of knowledge about developing tools and infrastructure. Translators are mostly Users and not Developers, who knows how to checkout, modify and push back changes from and into a source repository.

Translators form a bridge between the users and the developers allowing open source to be used in their own language.

I direct message that can answer that question:

I would like to thank all these amazing guys who have been contributing 25 languages at the moment. Special Thanks goes to Oscar Fonts, who helped a lot during project initialization phase and describing synchronization workflows.

There are many other people - especially all team coordinators - who made it a success so far:

AlexGacon,BelloWaff,engingem,fgdrf,fphg,ipotalamo,isoarpa,Lasnei,mapplus,oscar.fonts,PauliusL,ppanhh,TheLooka,vladimir_r,

xurxosanz,yecarrillo,bartvdebartvde, bchartierbchartier, BEignerBEigner,BesandBesand,cbredelcbredel,csorincsorin,cuneytoktaycuneytoktay,

DavorRaci?,diegospsdiegosps,dkusicdkusic,emacgillavryemacgillavry,ErenConErenCon,felix.liberiofelix.liberio,franz_erifranz_eri,

fvanderbiestfvanderbiest,gaiyonggaiyong,GeographyGeography,groldangroldan,hanchaohanchao,hiroshi.harimoto.1hiroshi.harimoto.1,

HugoMartinsHugoMartins,ibitzibitz,jls2933jls2933,jorn.vegard.rosnesjorn.vegard.rosnes,JRMJRM,juasmillajuasmilla,kalxaskalxas,

kazuyonagahamakazuyonagahama,kiu.sou1kiu.sou1,kladesskladess,k.muramatsuk.muramatsu,kullervo1892kullervo1892,

lazareveugenelazareveugene,lluis.rl.1996lluis.rl.1996,loic_geobretagneloic_geobretagne,MangoWoongMangoWoong,

mapconciergemapconcierge,mapconcierge_facebookmapconcierge_facebook,marceloboeiramarceloboeira,

MarceloThomazMarceloThomaz,marcjansenmarcjansen,MehmanMehman,miblonmiblon,miki.okano.106miki.okano.106,

msokomsoko,netinhonetinho,nyampirenyampire,oememoemem,phiocouekphiocouek,pmgmendespmgmendes,procarrieprocarrie,

rodrod,sanada_kazushisanada_kazushi,SeanParkSeanPark,shimiyushimiyu,taudorftaudorf,thanhlvthanhlv,ulysseskaoulysseskao,

vistonevistone,westriver1990westriver1990,wiselymanwiselyman,woutervannifterickwoutervannifterick,xuyongfsxuyongfs,

you.kudo.5you.kudo.5,????????

Thank you for giving me the chance to talk about it and I hope I’ll meet some of you at FOSS4G in Nottingham.

Q: That is right there is a GeoServer code-sprint - where can people sign up?

On the OSGeo wiki FOSS4G 2013 Code Sprint scroll down to the GeoServer entry and add your name.

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GeoServer 2.4-RC1 released

Aug 19, 2013 • geoserver

GeoServer team is pleased to announce the release of GeoServer 2.4-RC1. This release contains a set of bug fixes and minor improvements compared to 2.4-beta, including:

  • Some love to the layer group edit page, fixing style editing

  • Improvements in the CSS extension editor

  • A number of fixes in the CSW community module (scheduled to graduate to extension real soon now)

  • Making GML3 GetFeatureInfo output work against rasters too

  • A bunch of minor fixes to the new KML module

See the GeoServer 2.4-RC1 release notes for more details.

The next release candidate is scheduled in two weeks. If we don’t hear about major bugs reported against 2.4-RC1, we’ll release it as 2.4.0:  user community, your turn, please test RC1 now and let us know if anything major does not work as you expected. If you discover any issue, report it in our bug tracker and if you still do not have a login, you can create one at Codehaus (valid for all Codehaus services, including the GeoServer bug tracker they are graciously hosting for us).

About the GeoServer 2.4 series

GeoServer 2.4 continues our 6-month release cycle.

Volunteer opportunities:

  • We strongly encourage all interested parties to take part in testing GeoServer 2.4-RC1

The following change control requests were completed during the development of GeoServer 2.4:

Articles and blogs during GeoServer 2.4 development:

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