So we were hoping to do a big announcement of GeoServer 1.5.2 today. But our ambitious bug fixes and improvements (over 80 issues) has come back to haunt us, and taught us an important lesson about doing release candidates first, even if 1.5.2-RC1 doesn’t sound great to our ears. We squeezed in lots of Google Earth output improvements, added GeoRSS, improved the Google Maps demo with a better projection, and added paletted images for faster and lighter image generation.  And of course those have been where we’ve seen a few problems.  We’ve uploaded the release to sourceforge, but users have already reported a few small errors with GeoRSS and Google Maps, so we’re regrouping and hoping to gather any additional bug reports and do the big release announcements next week.

So in the meantime, dear readers, you can help us out a ton by downloading the latest release, testing it out and reporting any errors that you might encounter.  The issues that we know about for this release are available here, if you have one of these issues and its resolved you can try out the nightly build to test our fix.  If the issue is not yet resolved then rest assured it will be soon.  So please help us out, and watch for the big 1.5.2 announcement next week.  Thanks for all your support!

The GeoServer Project is pleased to announce that we have been certified compliant by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) for the Web Coverage Service 1.0 specification. The majority of this great work was contributed by GeoSolutions, and we are pleased that the quality is now completely certified by the OGC, as it passes all CITE tests. This makes GeoServer the most compliant open source server, with certified implementations of WFS 1.0, WFS 1.1, WMS 1.1.1, and now WCS 1.1. And not only are we compliant, but we remain ‘standard by default’, with no additional configuration needed to get fully compliant OGC output, for all the major specifications.

In addition to compliance, GeoServer also serves as the reference implementation of the WFS 1.0 and 1.1 specifications. This means that it is the open source implementation looked to as the main example for how the interface should respond. The Open Planning Project (TOPP), is also participating in OGC’s OWS-5 testbed, and will improve GeoServer for XLink WFS 1.1, as well as WCS 1.1 with the help of GeoSolutions. We are especially excited about serving as WCS 1.1 reference implementation, to continue our focus as the best open source implementation to get at raw data. We are looking to expand the capabilities of WCS to handle the full potential of the specification, allowing users to work with multi-dimensional data such as NetCDF and HDF, requesting specific bands and dimensions through the web.

We are also doing work on KML for the OWS-5 testbed, doing a Feature Portrayal Service capable of transforming a remote WFS and an SLD document to output KML. TOPP also will be improving OpenLayers to better handle KML, the current version and experimentation with future versions. The process will also start to flesh out what the next version of KML might look like, but I’ll blog about such things in its own post. We had a face to face meeting this morning, which continues tomorrow, where we made a decent start.

The Open Planning Project (TOPP), the main sponsor of GeoServer development, has just hired Tim Schaub, an active member of the OpenLayers Project Steering Committee. He will start work July 23. GeoServer has always been focused on standards on the server side, and its been great to see OpenLayers emerge as an extremely capable front end for open geospatial standards. With 1.5.1 GeoServer started shipping with OpenLayers as the default for previewing map, and also added OpenLayers as an output format for the WMS.

Hiring Tim represents a continued commitment to supporting OpenLayers development, and Tim will focus on expanding the capabilities of OpenLayers to be part of a powerful integrated online geospatial package with GeoServer. His initial work will focus on a client implementation of our Versioning WFS improvements. The other two major technical goals will be support for OWS Context Documents and a GUI driven SLD editor, so that people can easily remix and customize maps for their own needs. He will also focus on building up breadth of client services that TOPP offers, so as to offer a complete support package. We are excited to strengthen the links between the GeoServer and OpenLayers communities, and believe there’s a very bright future for both.

The GeoServer Team is pleased to announce the latest 1.6.x release: 1.6.0-beta2. We are hoping that our next release in this series will be a release candidate, so please help us out with testing as we work towards complete stability and reliability. This release should actually be quite solid, but it’s also got some major changes so we want another round of testing to be completely sure.

As for improvements, we’ve been making strides to allow GeoServer to play more nicely with Java Enterprise Edition containers. The biggest is that we’ve swapped out our connection pool code to be more Java EE compliant, enabling the use of JNDI configurations (though we still lack a UI for it), and defaulting to DBCP. This is a huge improvement over our old code, as it gives much more control over number of connections and can revalidate lost connections. It also again points to the strength of the Java open source world, as we’ve gotten a huge improvement by just leveraging an existing library.

This release also includes better logging options, giving users settings for the logging levels and where the output goes. Reprojection in WFS 1.1 is also working again, so GeoServer can now give you raw data reprojected on the fly. Other improvements include integrated demos for Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Virtual Earth, dateTimes are working again, and there are numerous small bug fixes. The full log is on our JIRA.

Mick Wilson, who I had the pleasure of meeting while I was doing a fellowship in Zambia, has been doing some great blogging lately about the progress in building a Spatial Data Infrastructure in East Africa.  His latest entry talks about a hands on training they ran, setting up GeoServer with PostGIS, uDig and qGIS.  It sounds like it was quite successful, and it’s really great to see GeoServer being used to help build capacity and give people the ability to share data.  We’re hoping to get feedback from his group and others on how to run such a training day, as it sounds like a great way to share skills and spread knowledge about GeoServer and the SDI stack around it.  If you’re interested in running your own training day or have done so in the past, please get in touch.