The GeoServer team is happy to announce to the release of GeoServer 2.2 and encourage you to download it and try out the great new features. The release of a new major version update is a big deal (the last one was over 16 months ago) and, while you may have heard about some of the new features on the developer list, here are the highlights all in one place:

Referencing

• NTv2 and NADCon Support allows for datum transformations with cm level precision (instead of the usual 4m, when all goes well). Both will activate only if the grid files are present in the data dir, so by default the mere presence of the method is harmless, but generally speaking this is very good news for whoever needs to increase reprojection accuracy. Thanks to Oscar Fonts and Andrea Aime.** **

• Continued work for supporting high accuracy datum transformations that now allow for user defined transformations supplied via WKT. Thanks to the Catalan Cartographic Institute for funding the work and to Oscar and Andrea for doing the development.

• A new **reprojection console **allows users to interactively test transformations of points and other geometries back and forth between the chosen CRS, and also to verify the transformation method used matches the user expectations. Thanks Andrea.

• Better support for un-referenced data with the new EPSG:40400 code that identifies a coordinate system made up of a generic 2D Cartesian plane. As well as support for EPSG:102113 as an alias for Web Mercator.

Data access

• **Database-level security **implements the ability to use DBMS session startup and teardown scripts to alter user access the database during a specific request while falling back on connection pooling when the request is complete. Thanks to Astrium GEO-Information Services for sponsoring GeoSolutions to make this improvement.

• Sorting and paging is now available in all WFS versions (in 1.0 and 1.1 as a vendor param) via the sortBy and startIndex/maxFeature parameters. Thanks to Justin Deoliveira and Andrea.

• A new** lenient capabilities mode** that allows the GeoServer capabilities documents to remain functioning despite the presence of misconfigured layers. Thanks to David Winslow for this work.

• A new experimental OGR data store provides access to  a rich set of readable formats without needing special bridge libraries.

• The image collection coverage store allows users to serve un-referenced data through WMS using image/pixel space as the coordinate system. Thanks to SFMTA for sponsoring OpenGeo to complete this work.

• Application schema support has performance, stability, and functional improvements including reduced memory footprint, SQL joining support for more efficient queries of complex information models, support for WMS, and support for GML 3.2 application schemas. Thanks to Rini Angreani, Niels Charlier, Victor Tey, Ben Caradoc-Davies, and the rest of the team at CSIRO. This work was funded through AuScope by the Australian Government.

• BigTiff support has received some performance and scalability improvements courtesy of upgrade to imageio-ext 1.1.5.

Security

• A major retrofit of the GeoServer security subsystem adding support for a number of new authentication mechanisms including LDAP, digest and X.509 certificate authentication, and more. These improvements also includes the addition of user groups. This is a continuation of work started by Christian Mueller as a Google Summer of Code project;  thanks to NOAA for sponsoring OpenGeo to help Christian and Justin bring it to completion.

Web Feature Source (WFS)

• Support for WFS 2.0 adds some interesting new capabilities to the WFS protocol such as paging, stored queries, and extended operators. Thanks to IGN France and Géoportail for sponsoring OpenGeo to make this improvement.

• Along with WFS 2.0 comes support for GML 3.2.

Web Map Service (WMS)

• Support for additional dimensions brings time and elevation support to both vector and raster data. And, with support for time, comes support for animation in WMS. Thanks to Andrea, Alessio and GeoSolutions on both counts.

• **Rendering transformations **provide a bridge between WPS and WMS and allow for very powerful visualization capabilities for processing through normal WMS. Thanks to GeoSolutions for sponsoring this work (and Andrea for implementing it).

• Support for 8-bit PNG output with transparency resulting in a nice tradeoff of performance and appealing visualization. Special thanks to Andrea for this new feature.

Web Processing Service (WPS)

• New WPS features include support for asynchronous process execution and a variety of new processes.

Virtual Services

• Virtual services allow GeoServer to support the notion of multitenancy, enabling a single GeoServer instance to publish multiple service endpoints. Thanks to NOAA for sponsoring OpenGeo to complete this improvement and a special thanks to Micah Wengren of NOAA for his leadership on the project.

• Workspace local settings allow for specifying service settings such as contact information,  proxy settings, and output format settings on a per workspace basis.

• Styles and layer groups can also now be defined on a per workspace basis.

GeoWebCache

• A GeoWebCache configuration GUI is now available directly from within the GeoServer web admin interface, including: the ability to define new grid sets, specify which layers to cache, seed or truncate the cache, and more. Big thanks to Gabriel and the GeoWebCache team for furthering improving integration between GeoWebCache in GeoServer.

**Wow! **And that isn’t even everything, many other bug fixes and improvements have made it into the 2.2 series as well.

Everyone who uses GeoServer should have at least one or two items in the above list to be excited about. Download GeoServer 2.2, try it out, and provide feedback on the GeoServer mailing list.  As with any new version, be sure to backup your data directory before upgrading.

Thanks again for using GeoServer!

Download GeoServer 2.2

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.2-RC3.The release is available for download from: http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/GeoServer+2.2-RC3

This release comes with assorted bug fixes and small improvements, and aims to be the latest RC before the final release. Notable changes:

• improvements in the security subsystem upgrade from the 2.1.x series

• bug fixes and improvements in the control-flow module (you won’t be wondering anymore if it’s properly installed, or not)

• avoid deadlocks on some WFS transactions

The entire change logfor the 2.2-RC3 release is available in the issue tracker: http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10311&version=18700 A very special thanks to all those who contributed bug fixes and improvements to this release. –The GeoServer Team

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of  GeoServer 2.2-RC2, now available for download here. We would like to encourage you to download and try out some of our new features and let us know if there are any bugs to be fixed.

This release includes plenty of bug fixes and new improvements such as:

• Have rest endpoint display a note when no rest extensions are installed

• Rearrange GWC UI components for higher consistency

• Support EPSG:102113 as an alias for web mercator

• Write GWC specific HTTP response headers when using direct WMS integration

• Control the meta tile output format cache so that external apps can drop it on demand

• Made it possible to configure embedded gwc tile layers through the REST API

• Made GWC “direct WMS integration” work with virtual services

For more information, please refer to the changelog for this release.

A big thank you to all the users, contributors, and sponsors that have helped to make this release possible by providing feedback and support to the GeoServer community.

The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of  GeoServer 2.2-RC1, now available for download. We would like to encourage you to download and try out some of our new features and let us know if there are any bugs to be fixed.

This release includes plenty of bug fixes and new improvements such as:

• Allow security provider plugins to hook into initialization process

• REST security configuration improvement

• Allow KML Document Title to be set by format_options parameters

• Increased performance when saving a layer whose native SRS has no native EPSG code

• Added functionality for setting return page to GeoServerBasePage

For more information, please refer to the changelog for this release.

The GeoServer team have also migrated from the SVN repository to GitHub and would like to give a special thanks to Justin Deoliveira from OpenGeo for all his hard work into making the migration possible.

A big thank you to all the users, contributors, and sponsors that have helped to make this release possible by providing feedback and support to the GeoServer community.

GeoServer and GeoTools have moved to Git and GitHub for version control and source hosting.  We hope that this change will make work easier for existing GeoServer developers and encourage contributions from new ones.

Git is a relatively new version management software.  Compared with the Subversion software that GeoServer previously used, it offers several features including offline commits and history browsing, cryptographic checksums for commits, and several advanced options for automatic merging.  In addition, Git’s distributed nature means that any potential contributor can “fork” the GeoServer code and make changes instead of waiting on a GeoServer committer to grant access.  (Such changes must still be approved by the GeoServer development team in order to be included in an official GeoServer release.)

Along with the shift to Git, we are moving GeoServer’s source hosting to GitHub.  GitHub provides free hosting for open-source projects, including nice tracking of forks, a syntax-highlighting source browser, and interesting reports on who is contributing to the project. GeoServer’s documentation, bug tracking, mailing lists, and IRC chat, however, are unaffected by the move.

The GeoServer developer manual has been updated with instructions on working with Git.  If you are a Git guru with some tips to add to the guide, a savvy user with addenda for the manual, or a Java hacker with bugs to fix, please fork us on GitHub!