GeoServer 1.6.2 is now available for download here. This is a Security Release, which means it contains fixes for two Security Vulnerabilities. We highly recommend that you upgrade to this version. We found out about both these vulnerabilities in the past couple days, and made an effort to fix them and get this release out as quickly as possible. One of the issues also affects older versions of GeoServer. We are not doing a security release for it at this time for all the older versions, but have clear instructions on how to update one file to disable the page where the exploit is possible. We highly recommend that any production instances of GeoServer follow this, it should be easier to do than a full upgrade.

The GeoServer team announces the release of GeoServer version 1.6.1! Here are some of the highlights in this release:

GeoServer now supports FeatureType aliases, which allows for the creating of friendly names for unwieldy FeatureTypes. Also, support has been added for limiting (per FeatureType) the maximum number of features that can be requested by a client, thus easing server load. (Thanks to Landgate for funding both of the above!). Cédric Briançon from Geomatys contributed the GetFeatureInfo operation on WMS coverage data, and GeoServer can now output PDFs from raster as well as vector data. Saul Farber of MassGIS added support for UpdateSequence, which returns a “revision number” of the capabilities of the service; this gives clients more efficient access to the Capabilities document. Also, there have been improvements in MySQL integration: The Java connector was updated, performance was improved, and GeoServer is now using the more-efficient Well Known Binary protocol.

In total, this new release contains over 40 patches and improvements since 1.6.0. (You can view the changelog for details. You can download this latest version from geoserver.org. As usual, we thank everyone who has tested out the software and reported issues. Please continue to submit bug reports using our bug tracker.

Early this year I submitted an article to GIS Development and it got published in the February issue!! You can check out the article here. Let us know what you think.

Since I have been the intern at The Open Planning Project for a couple of months, I think that its about time I introduce myself and what I have been up to. First the introductions. I am Ivan Willig, an undergrad at College of the Atlantic and currently studying urban planning. Now to my work. As some of you might know (if you read this blog) Tim Coulter and Sebastian Benthall have doing some excellent work with GeoServer, Versioning WFS and OpenLayers. The software uses versioning to allow shared editing and viewing history of edits. I have taken their work and applied it to make a new GeoServer user’s map. You may remember the old map, kind of slow and hard to use. I hope that ease of use of the new GeoServer user’s map will encourage all you GeoServer people to post. You will find the GeoServer user’s map at http://sigma.openplans.org/users/. It should be fairly self-explanatory, however if you have any questions let me know at iwillig [at] openplans.org.

You might also notice that user’s map is using nicer styles for the Tiger dataset on Sigma. Tiger is the US Census data set that has high quality data for the whole United States, road, water-bodies… etc. This was the other part of my work at TOPP, redoing the styles for the Tiger dataset. I am building off the work done by Arne Kepp and Portland’s TriMet.

To find out more about integrating GeoServer and Tiger information please visit the GeoServer wiki http://geoserver.org/display/GEOSDOC/Loading+TIGER+data.

Vmap is a similar dataset, produced by the Department of Defense, but covering the whole world. Check out this tutorial out for more info. http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOSDOC/Loading+VMAP0+data .

GeoWebCache is finally out in the open and announced on freshmeat.net and other pages. This should really have happened a long time ago, and there are many reasons for why it didn’t, but I am very excited about the current momentum.

GeoWebCache, is a tile cache, meaning it acts as a proxy between the client and the WMS server (GeoServer) and stores the image. If another client requests the tile it can respond in milliseconds, regardless of the complexity of the tile. It is different from a regular HTTP proxy, such as Squid, in that it interprets the parameters and matches them to the best tile supported by the configuration.

It is currently not as mature as say Tile Cache, but has the advantage that you do not need a webserver with Python support. It can either be run in Tomcat, alongside GeoServer, or as a standalone server using Jetty (no binaries are available yet, but we will make them soon).

We have not been sitting still since releasing 0.6.0 either. Based on a customer request we have already added native support for Microsoft Virtual Earth’s quadkey scheme. This is currently available in the repository, and we’ll probably push it out in a new version soon, after looking into whether we can do the same for the Google Maps API.

Looking to version 0.7.0 and beyond we will start working on integrating GeoWebCache more tightly with GeoServer. Some key features are

• Automatic configuration based on what layers are available . This will obviously have some limitations, since there are important parameters that the user will have to make some decisions on.

• Update events, so that when the data changes on the backend GeoWebCache will automatically purge the affected tiles and (optionally) reseed them.

• A nice RESTful API that we can program an easy to use JavaScript client against.

There are some internal structures that should still be simplified, and now that the basic structure has solidified we’ll gradually start adding tests.

Want to see it in action? http://sigma.openplans.org has been using GeoWebCache for over two months (and uncovered some bugs in the process). We look forward to upgrading the site with something that is really pretty to look at, probably soon.

Please sign up to the mailing lists if you are interested, we’d love to hear back from you so that we can fix bugs, improve the documentation and stake out the general course.