GeoServer Blog

Roadmap scorecard

So I’m about to update the GeoServer Roadmap, since the short term projects currently listed should be done. And I thought before doing that I’d see how we did against the previous goals. Of course we don’t make any promises about delivery of these, unless of course someone funds a core developer to meet a hard deadline. But it’s worthwhile to see how we measured up, to get a progress report on where everything is at.

GeoServer 1.5.x

1.5.0 Released! Woo hoo! This took a good bit longer than expected, but I think everyone is quite satisfied. It’s our most stable and scalable release yet, with lots of good bug fixes and improvements for users, in addition to the incredible new raster support. We’re planning for more 1.5.x releases, back porting the fixes and smaller improvements from 1.6.x, including using openlayers for demos and some very nice KML improvements, and a contributed Chinese translation of the web admin.

Further Tiling Infrastructure

So unfortunately our research on this didn’t yield the results we were hoping for, as we wanted a rendering option that worked better with tiling. But it turns out that doing meta-tiles (rendering an image much bigger than the tiles then splitting them up). There is great news on this front, though, which is that Google’s Summer of Code has funded Chris Whitney to make a JTileCache, a pure java port of TileCache, backed in his initial implementation by JCS, which will let us make distributed caches very easily. Since it’s java we’ll be able to ship with GeoServer, and it will function as a stand-alone.

Speed Improvements to WMS Renderer

Most of the speed improvements of the past few months have actually been made on the WFS side of the fence. Chris Tweedie has some information on his blog, the main work done is not so much on speed improvements, but on setting up a framework for stress tests so we can measure things much more easily. But Andrea also found some great improvements that doubled-t3541274.html) the WFS output in some cases.

GeoCollaborator (Geowiki) experimental implementation

The server side implementation is close to done, we’ve got a working interface, which we encourage to try out and write clients against. We’ve got it working against existing WFS-T implementations, but we’re working to collaborate on a ‘version-aware’ client. The one remaining piece we need to do on the server side is a bit orthogonal, but necessary, and that’s a security framework. Andrea is gathering requirements and evaluating right now, if you have any feedback throw it on the wiki. Our needs are minor at the moment, but we’d like to pick something that can expand for future uses.

LGPL for the core

I’m still working on this. We’ve decided to just push on getting contributor agreements first that will give us the flexibility to re-license by having all the legal pieces in place, and then we’ll figure out LGPL for the core at a separate time. But I hope to have progress on this relatively soon, so that potential users can license GeoServer under non-GPL licenses.

WFS 1.1 / architecture improvements

Justin finished this up. It is on trunk and will be one of the main pieces of 1.6.0. It’s currently available in an alpha release, and hopefully a beta release pretty soon. Other developers have had good feedback on the new dispatching architecture.

New Geotools Feature Model

Gabriel has made some great progress on this. Hopefully he’ll give us all a full update soon. We also got some great news on this front, as TOPP has been awarded a CAP grant to work on uDig, making it able to accept WFS 1.1 with US Framework Schemas, which will entail getting on to trunk the GeoTools feature model that GeoServer fully depends upon.

So overall I feel we did pretty well.  In the next week I’ll update the roadmap and talk a bit more about the exciting stuff coming down the pipeline.  And hopefully we’ll get the developers talking more about what they’ve been working on, since there’s even more than what I’ve managed to mention here.

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Vitality!

With all the releases that the GeoServer team has been making, topped off by 1.5.0, we’ve managed to crack the top 20 open source projects on freshmeat.net for ‘vitality’. We’ve got a lot more coming out soon, so hopefully we’ll be up there and even higher in the future. If you’re reading this today, you can go to http://freshmeat.net/stats/#vitality and see. If not we’ve got the screenshot.

Freshmeat Screenshot

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GeoServer 1.5.0 Released

The GeoServer Project is proud to announce the release of version 1.5.0. This release turns GeoServer in to a complete solution for serving any type of spatial data, as the primary focus has been support for raster formats, starting with GeoTiff, ArcGrid, World Images, GTOPO30, and image mosiacs and pyramids. As always GeoServer is focused on open standards and open data, making the rasters available as a Web Map Service, but also through the Web Coverage Service specification, which gives full access to the raw data, not just the final image. The WCS passes all OGC Compliance tests, and will be fully certified very soon. Other notable improvements for this release include easier adding of data through the web admin tools, better support for Google Earth KML, performance and scalability improvements, and as always a heap of bug fixes. The release can be found here.

The Web Coverage Service implementation and WMS raster support have been the result of work carried out by GeoSolutions, who have been a prominent member of the GeoServer community for some time. The community is glad to take this contribution and make it part of the GeoServer core and thanks GeoSolutions for their excellent work. It is amazing to see not just bug fixes and new data formats, but completely new functionality that would not be possible without the ever expanding community.

This is an exciting time for GeoServer. As we look to the future there are more interesting developments on the horizon. Among them include Versioning WFS, a full implementation of WFS 1.1, multi-dimensional raster data through the WCS, and support for security and authentication. Also expect to keep seeing improvements to performance and scalability, better support for KML, and a variety of other neat and interesting features.

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Translators Apply Here

As we get closer and closer to GeoServer 1.5.0 it is time to make sure that our translations are up to date. Currently GeoServer maintains translations for the French, German, Spanish, and Japanese languages. We have been able to so with kind contributions from our users. And we are always looking to expand in order to support new languages.

So… are you a GeoServer user whose native tongue is not English or one the languages listed above? Are you looking to get more involved in the GeoServer project? Well what better way to so then to become a translation maintainer. Heck, its the easiest way to obtain commit status without writing any code :).

If interested please do not hesitate to post a message to the users list and let us know. The Translation Guide details the process of maintaining a translation and what you will be getting yourself into. Any contributions will be much appreciated by all of us in the GeoServer community.

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Help us test 1.5.0-RC3!

The GeoServer team has been working away trying to get things ready for our completely stable 1.5.0 release. We’re crossing our fingers that this is the final release candidate, but we want to make sure it’s incredibly solid. So you can help us out a ton by downloading the release and reporting any and all problems. Even small ones, even documentation being a bit off. As we really want to get this out the door we promise that most any real new bug reported will be dealt with incredibly fast.

There have been a number of fixes for this release, we greatly improved error reporting in the GUI with regards to setting up files (shapefiles and rasters), and added a ‘directory datastore’ for easier management.  The two of these greatly improve the work flow for the most common data adding operations.  We’ll try to get the documentation on using this new feature up to date soon, but it should be pretty obvious from the gui. A bug with rotation in image files was fixed, along with multi geometries in in-line features. PostGIS also now has an option to use ‘estimated extents’, for those with huge datasets. And a ‘reflector’ was added to allow defaults for WMS requests, more docs on that soon as well. Also improved were SLD parsing, date handling and logging. If you want to get to the nitty gritty of the bug fixes, the full change log is available.

I personally am really excited about this coming 1.5.0 release, it feels really solid, has a lot of great new code, and really represents a (first) culmination of all the hard work that the Geo-Solutions guys have put in. It’s great to see GeoServer grow in to an even more diverse community. It’s a challenge to deal with all the incoming code at once, but one of those ‘good’ challenges that means there are just lots of big new features coming our way. Look for an Ingestion Engine, WFS versioning, 4d+ Coverages, Complex Features, better Google Earth support, a new UI, and WFS 1.1 all coming online pretty soon. It’s an exciting time.  Shoot, that reminds me, I probably should update the road map again.  I just can’t keep up with all this great work.

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