The GeoServer team is happy to announce an extension for Microsoft SQL Server, currently available as a nightly build. Instructions for getting the extension up and running are available on the wiki.

At this point the extension is still quite young and is missing some key features like spatial indexing and support for well known binary. By trying it out and providing us with feedback you can help drive development of these features.

The extension is based on the recent re-architecture in GeoTools for database backed data stores. Code named “JDBC Next Generation”, it provides a framework for building new data store implementations quickly and robustly. Also based on this architecture are soon to come improved extensions for MySQL, Oracle, and DB2. A new extension for SpatiaLite is also in the works.

Download the SQL Server extension and try it out. We are very eager to here any feedback on the mailing list. You can also help us make it better by reporting any issues in our bug tracker.

GeoServer is a open source project, developed and supported by a diverse group of people from around the world. To highlight this, OpenGeo has built a simple map showing the locations of GeoServer developers. Each developer’s location is marked with a blue point. Clicking on that point will produce a pop-up with the developer’s name and a brief bio.

GeoServer Developers Map

This map interface is built using OpenLayers. The data points are saved in a PostGIS database and are served through GeoServer. OpenLayers accesses the data using the WFS protocol. The background image is currently the Google terrain layer, but will soon be replaced by OpenStreetMap data.

If you are a GeoServer developer and wish to be included on the map, let us know. Please include your name, a short bio, and the city, state, and country where you live. If anyone has any other comments about this map or the technology behind it, please write to us at inquiry@opengeo.org.

OpenGeo and Safe Software have been talking about working together to make life easier for users of FME and GeoServer.  We’ve both been hearing more about organizations using FME to solve their data conversion challenges and then making the results available to the world using the OpenGeo Stack.

While many people are making things work with the software now, we figure that a few improvements towards tighter integration could be a big win.  Our end goal is to enable FME Server and GeoServer to work together seamlessly.  This allows each piece to solve the area they excel at - GeoServer in OGC standards and web output formats, FME at complex data conversions and translations.  With a few key improvements the combined solution should solve the ‘Community Schema’ problem that Ron Lake recently brought up better than any software in world.  In time the GeoServer community will definitely build the capability to handle the full community schema transformation natively, but integrating with FME should provide a transitional path, and FME will always be ahead in terms of the most advanced translations.

If you are a user of both FME and GeoServer we’d love to hear from you with input on how we could work together to make your life easier (or you can just give us encouragement ;).  We are still in the early stages, hoping to put together a rough prototype relatively soon, but beta testers in the future will be appreciated. And of course additional funding will enable us to prioritize the work and get it done faster.  If you are interested in helping out please get in touch at the OpenGeo contact form.

The GeoServer team is proud to announce the release of GeoServer 1.7.0, available here for download. This is a very big release for GeoServer as the 1.7.x series brings some exciting new features and improvements.

Security in 1.7 has been improved by allowing access control at the layer/feature type level, in addition to the service level. This allows users to secure data in a much more granular way. There has also been much work done to better performance for GeoServer 1.7. The short of which is faster rendering with WMS, as well as faster data access with Shapefile, PostGIS, and ArcSDE. For those interested in the specifics check out the presentation given by Andrea Aime at FOSS4G this year in South Africa. Also of note for this release is a retrofit of the built in OpenLayers map preview. The preview interface now allows for filtering and controlling various rendering aspects such as anti-aliasing and image format.

The folks from GeoSolutions have also been quite busy as usual and have once again made some great improvements on the raster/coverage side of things. GeoServer now supports additional raster formats such as ECW, MrSID, and JPEG 2000. This has been achieved by leveraging the GDAL library. As well as additional formats GeoSolutions has also provided the ability to perform much more powerful coverage portrayal via the SLD RasterSymbolizer construct. With support for RasterSymbolizer users can now do channel selection, define color maps, perform contrast enhancement, and more. Special thanks to GeoSolutions.

As the GeoServer community expands, so does the number of translations to support other languages. 1.7 brings a Dutch and a Russian translation. Thanks to Leon Vanberio and Maxim Dubinin for their great contributions. And special thanks to all users who helped us test the 1.7 release candidates and filed bugs in the tracker.

Not only is GeoServer 1.7.0 a big release for users, it’s also a notable one for developers. Some major improvements have been done to the GeoServer core which will act as building blocks for features in future releases. This involves a change to the internal feature model which now allows the modeling of complex feature relationships; something that gets us closer to achieving full community schema support. There have also been changes to the back-end configuration subsystem which now has a much cleaner API for developers writing plug-ins and user interface components. It will also serve as the base for supporting additional persistence mechanisms such as hibernate and other O/R mappers.

And as usual a heap of bugs were fixed for this release. Over 200 issues were handled for 1.7.0.

Download, try it out, and let us know what you think. Comments and feedback are always welcome on the mailing list. The community is always interested to hear how people are using GeoServer. Also stay tuned for the 1.7.1 release, due out in a month or so, which will include some exciting new improvements to Google Earth and KML support.

I’d like to quickly congratulate the uDig developers team for releasing the newest version of uDig.  uDig 1.1 has a venerable history.  Quite a venerable history, as releases go.  In fact, I think uDig might be in line for some kind of Guinness-style award for having the most release candidates (with 14 RCs and even 3 Sanity Checks).  I certainly don’t mean this as a dig (sorry, couldn’t help myself); it just shows that the team wanted to be sure to release a quality product as free of bugs as possible.  That said, the GeoServer team does feel slightly better about our growing number of release candidates (currently at 1.7.0-RC4).  No matter.  uDig is an excellent desktop GIS product and is a great complement to GeoServer.  (I personally have always appreciated its ability to generate SLDs quickly and painlessly.)  Go check it out.

**Update: **I’ve been asked off-camera about uDig’s editing capabilities.  uDig does in fact follow the WFS-T(ransaction) standard, and is one of the best clients out there for doing so.  In this way, one can use uDig to edit features served using GeoServer from the safety of a familiar GUI.  That’s big news (shapefiles and other data structures can be rather opaque to edit otherwise) and I think it merits a mention here.