This week has been a busy one for the GeoServer team with two releases coming out. The community is happy to announce the release of both 2.0.3 and 2.1-RC3.

GeoServer 2.0.3 is a maintenance release for the 2.0.x branch and contains over 60 fixes and a few small new features. For those who have already upgraded to 2.1 there is nothing new but those still on 2.0.2 will find:

• Ability to limit the amount of raster data read and delivered in each WCS request

• A host of stabilization improvements in the WFS department, allowing GeoServer to widthstand higher WFS workloads

• The new control flow extension allowing administrators to exert finer control over the number of parallel requests a GeoServer will handle, to ensure the server cannot be overloaded by malicious users or by a spike in traffic

• Ability to read the GeoServer log file directly from the user interface, without the need to hunt it down in the data directory

• Improvements to the ogr2ogr extension, allowing for the use of the famous ogr2ogr utility to extend the number of GeoServer WFS output formats

• Finer control over shapefiles returned by the SHAPE-ZIP output format

This release is likely the last of the 2.0.x series as the 2.1.0 release nears completion.

The third release candidate of GeoServer 2.1 also brings a number of bug fixes and improvements including:

• The querylayer module which is a powerful extension that allows for cross layer filtering

• Support for GML3 encoding in Atom/RSS output formats

• Raster to vector conversion processes for WPS

• Inclusion of WMS decorations in PDF output

And more. Check out the entire change log for more information.

Thanks to everyone who have worked hard over the past few months adding features and fixing bugs, in order to make this release happen. As usual, we encourage you to download, try it out, and provide feedback on the users mailing list.

AuScope is running a three-day Spatial Information Services Stack Workshop in Canberra on 22-24 March 2011.

The Spatial Information Services Stack - an Australian Interoperable SDI http://auscope.org/res/file/downloads/grid/SISS_Program-form.pdf

22-24 March 2011 Geoscience Australia Cnr Jerrabomberra Ave and Hindmarsh Drive Symonston ACT 2609

**Background **

The Spatial Information Services Stack (SISS) is a suite of tools for spatial data interoperability. SISS uses OGC standards, GML application schema, modelling tools, vocabulary support services and registries. AuScope is deploying the SISS in multiple Australian Government agencies and research organisations. AuScope has developed a Web portal to demonstrate the infrastructure, and to encourage the development of other third party client tools. As SISS is built on open source technologies others are encouraged to use the stack and assist in its development.

SISS builds on existing technologies including GeoServer, FullMoon and GeoNetwork. AuScope has made enhancements to support complex application schemas like GeoSciML and WaterML, and quality improvements to raise the quality of service level and ensure stack completeness. For example, the AuScope portal uses GeoNetwork to discover services, and the application schemas supported by GeoServer are developed and tested with FullMoon. SISS provides a complete solution to develop, establish and maintain OGC standards compliant infrastructures.The development of SISS was funded by NCRIS through the NeAT initiative.

**Workshop goal **

The goal of the workshop is to show how communities can use SISS to provide transparent interoperable access to spatial data and knowledge about Australia.

Full programme and registration form: http://auscope.org/res/file/downloads/grid/SISS_Program-form.pdf

Space is limited so places will be allocated to ensure representation from the greatest number of organisations in each session.

The GeoServer community is happy to announce that the second release candidate of GeoServer 2.1 is now available for download. There is not much in the way of new features for this release, but the team has been busy fixing bugs. Checkout the change log for the list of fixes.

Download and try 2.1-RC2 now. You can help us reach the final 2.1 release by reporting any bugs in the issue tracker and sending feedback to the mailing list. Thanks for supporting GeoServer.

The GeoServer community is happy to announce that the first release candidate of GeoServer 2.1 is now available for download. The team has been busy working on some great new improvements and features since 2.1-beta3.

First up is GeoWebCache integration, allowing clients to enjoy the benefits of tile caching through the regular GeoServer WMS endpoint. This enables GeoWebCache to transparently proxy for the GeoServer WMS without the need for a separate service endpoint. Taking advantage of the recently added disk-quota functionality, GeoWebCache now provides the ability to set limits on the amount of disk space used for storing tiles, allowing users to control and limit the size of the tile cache on disk. Big thanks to Gabriel Roldán for the great GeoWebCache improvements.

This release also brings some improvements to RESTConfig, which is now shipped with GeoServer by default so users need no longer install it as a separate plugin. Improvements to the API include the file upload operation that now allows for uploading files into an existing data store. This addition allows users to upload a shapefile and have it converted automatically into a PostGIS database, publishing it as a PostGIS layer rather than as a Shapefile layer. Finally, the API also supports recursive DELETE operations, making it more convenient to remove resources that contain other resources like stores or workspaces. Thanks to David Winslow and Justin Deoliveira of OpenGeo for these improvements.

Thanks to some great work from the folks at GeoSolutions, raster reprojection performance has improved significantly by using linear appoximations of transformation functions. This improvement was initially added in 2.1-beta3 but has continued to be improved for 2.1-RC1. Those interested should checkout this article that links to a white paper with the full technical details.

Last but certainly not least, thanks to Andrea Aime for the addition of a Web Coverage Service request builder, a handy tool for graphically building WCS requests to test a coverage service. As clients for WCS have always been sparse, this tool goes a long way for making the service more usable.

We are happy to report the contribution of yet another translation of the web admin interface—special thanks to Oscar Fonts for submitting a Catalan translation and to Geodata Sistemas for funding the work.

Also worthy of thanks this round is Ivan Grcic who has submitted some excellent patches, including bug fixes for WMS layer functionality. Thanks Ivan!

As always, a number of other bug fixes and improvements have made it into this release. Check out the change log for all new and noteworthy changes.

Download and try 2.1-RC1 now. You can help us reach the final 2.1 release by reporting any bugs in the issue tracker and sending feedback to the mailing list.

Thanks for supporting GeoServer!

The GeoServer community is proud to announce the release of 2.1-beta3, which is now available for download.

The big feature for this release is support for WMS 1.3. Special thanks goes out to Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, for providing OpenGeo with funding to complete the task. With WMS 1.3 mandated by the INSPIRE Initiative, the Ordnance Survey needed to meet the INSPIRE requirements.  Rather than implement a solution on their own, they opted to fund the GeoServer project so that other organizations in the UK and the rest of Europe and the world could all benefit.

This is the value and the beauty of open source. Government agencies across Europe can now upgrade their servers to the latest GeoServer at no additional cost.  In time, other mapping agencies can and will further benefit one another by funding additional GeoServer improvements, like WFS 2.0 and Application Schema configurations for INSPIRE, but the Ordnance Survey deserves special recognition from all GeoServer users for taking the lead.

In addition to WMS 1.3, this release includes some SLD 1.1 / SE 1.1 enhancements.  It will be possible to use most SE 1.1 documents, though not every new option is fully supported yet.  User feedback on which new options we should support first is greatly appreciated.  Also funded by Ordnance Survey is a community module to implement the WMS extensions for INSPIRE View Service compliance—namely the language parameter and several extended capabilities fields.

The release also includes a few nice fixes and improvements from beta2, such as upgrading CQL to ECQL, and a fix by Eli Miller, a newcomer to the GeoServer community, to allow the REST Config API to properly handle SQL Views.

We encourage you to download GeoServer 2.1-beta3, try it out, and let us know if there are any bugs. This software is still a beta, so we recommend testing extensively before running it in a production environment. That said, we’re hoping to move to 2.1.0 release candidates soon, so any and all testing will this process move along faster.

Download GeoServer 2.1-beta3