The GeoServer team is excited to announce that GeoServer 1.6.0 has been released. There are a host of advances from 1.5.x, and many GeoServer users have been testing the release candidates and giving us great feedback, so this final release should be very stable. Foremost among the improvements is a huge performance increase in the rendering of maps (WMS), bringing GeoServer speed that matches the fastest mapping engines in the world. The other big focus has been on tightening everything up, as we’ve been getting more and more feedback from production deployments of GeoServer (which we’ll highlight soon in this blog).

The most cutting edge new feature is support for ‘versioning’ as extensions to WFS-T. This allows users to edit geographic data as if it was a wiki or in a version control system like svn. You can check out the preliminary demo, though we’re working on a more intuitive user interface. The start of that can be seen on our New York annotation demo, which also has a base map served by GeoServer. Right now only PostGIS can support versioning, but we’re hoping to find funding to hook it up to the native versioning in ArcSDE and Oracle Spatial.

There are also a number of other new features, including WFS 1.1 support, which adds reprojection when accessing raw data, as well as the ability for queries to return the number of results expected before getting the full results. We’ve also added a new integrated security subsystem, built on Acegi, to provide role-based access control to GeoServer resources. There is also improved connectivity to Google Maps/Virtual Earth/Yahoo! Maps, leveraging better integration with OpenLayers as well as bug fixes for our Google Earth support.

Also added is the WFS datastore, enabling GeoServer to serve as a Cascading WFS and a Component WMS (also known as a Feature Portrayal Service). Another cool improvement is our WMS reflector, which makes it a lot easier to experiment with map rendering through the browser. There are countless other improvements and fixes, in all over 400 issues were handled for the 1.6.0 release.

Stay tuned for the 1.6.1 release, we’ve already got a bunch of improvements lined up for it that we’ve held off on to get 1.6.0 absolutely stable. Thanks to everyone for all your hard work on this one, it’s a great step forward for this community, and the future is looking quite bright. And just to give the link one more time, the release can be downloaded from geoserver.org.

Though it’s a bit overdue, we finally got around to updating the GeoServer Roadmap.  There’s a lot of activity going on, and we generally have a good sense of what should be completed in the next three months, with more and more vague ideas on what may be further out.  I still want to work some more on the long term / dream section, as I’ve had some more fun thoughts recently.  But there should be a lot of great work in the next few months, which is exciting.  Highlights include online SLD editing, integrated tile caching, security improvements, a better ‘preview’ application, and more.  The thing I’m most excited about is the REST configuration service, which should make it much easier to add data programmatically, and is how we’re going to integrate with GeoNetwork Open Source.

The best part of updating the roadmap is looking back at what we hoped to accomplish and seeing what we succeeded in.  This time is a bit of a softball, since we are late on updating so the ‘short term’ ones were supposed to be finished several months ago.  But we aimed to do quite a bit, and most of it has come to pass.  GeoServer 1.6.x is just about to go to 1.6.0, with not only a new security framework, WFS 1.1 and versioning WFS, but also great increases in speed and reliability.  KML support has improved a lot, and is only getting better, as we have some more funded work to make it stream large datasets really well.  The new output formats - GeoRSS, 8bit PNGs, and GeoJSON are now all released and performing well.  And we’ve got a new security system and backend for geocollaboration.  The prototype for a GeoServer 2.0 was built, and feels ready to move on, though unfortunately it has not moved much past a prototype phase.   The only short term goal that was not completed was ECW, MrSID and JPEG2000 support, but those are actively being worked on right now, and we expect at least one pretty soon.  Thanks to everyone for all their hard work, things are really coming together in to a great product, and the future looks even brighter - we’re truly only just getting started.

We are happy to announce the third release candidate for 1.6.0. You can grab it from SourceForge.

That coveted 1.6.0 release is getting closer and closer and we are almost there. The previous release candidate brought out some performance related issues. A memory leak issue and a problem with filter parsing leading to stack overflows. These have been fixed along with some other minor bugs addressed as well. For a complete list of all the good stuff check out the changelog.

Special thanks to everyone who tried out RC2 and reported issues. You can continue to help us get the official 1.6.0 release out by trying out this release candidate and reporting any issues in the bug tracker.

Though I admit the name made me a bit scared, Andrea Aime pointed out a really nice use of some of our favorite platforms in the ‘WarViews’ project.  No, it’s not some geolocated remote missile camera, it’s a project by the International Conflict Research (IRC) group at a Swiss university that attempts to show more clearly the link between geography and conflict.

It complies several GIS datasets of conflict, and shows them on a static map built with OpenLayers, as well as a really nice use of GeoServer’s Google Earth time support to demonstrate the events over time.   I just wanted to point out their great work to everyone, go and have a play with what they’ve built.  It does a great job of showing how you get multiple output options with GeoServer, and can point users to appropriate clients that take advantage of different features.  If another researcher wanted the actual GIS data they could easily point at the WFS and get the raw GML or Shapefiles of the data.

We are happy to announce the second release candidate of GeoServer 1.6.0. You can download the release from SourceForge.

As usual this release candidate brings a heap of bug fixes, with a few minor improvements. Output formats such as KML, SVG, and GeoRSS have been tightened up fixing a few minor bugs. Backend issues such as PostGIS bounds reprojection and Oracle permissions have also been addressed. For a complete list check out the change log.

There are also a few notable improvements to mention. The first being a “strict” request parameter which allows clients to turn on WFS XML validation on a request by request basis. This provides a nice debugging tool for clients to use for validating WFS requests. Also worth mention is the ongoing work and improvements to the experimental Versioning WFS protocol.

With any luck this will be the last release candidate before the official 1.6.0 release. You can help us out by downloading it and trying out. Please report any issues encountered in the bug tracker.