Mike Frumin, who has been actively working with GeoServer and OpenLayers the past few months, has just released the culmination of his work for the Regional Planning Association. In his write up on his blog he includes a number of pictures that were generated by GeoServer, and links to a really nice OpenLayers application, as well as the same information in Google Earth. Both made extensive use of GeoServer, with some custom processing for a couple things that were pushing the envelope (that we hope to completely support in GeoServer eventually), including KML customization and SLD extensions. Read his post, it’s a great demonstration of using maps to tell a story, and we’re excited that they’re powered by GeoServer.

Another hint for those wanting the latest and greatest versions of GeoServer.  We’ve now got a nightly build server going, making snapshots of the latest code for the 1.5.x branch and trunk, at http://geo.openplans.org/nightly/.  We do our best to fix a raft of bugs for each new release, and downloading a nightly build will get you access to those without having to figure out subversion and maven and all our other build tools.  If you see that a bug you’re interested in was recently fixed you can download the next nightly, test it out and give us feedback.  That helps the GeoServer developers immensely, so we can be sure that our actual releases are as close to bug free as possible.  If you’ve got your ‘data directory’ set up properly with GeoServer than upgrading to a nightly should be a cinch, allowing you to test out the latest improvements with your already configured data.

The GeoServer team has been hard at work fixing bugs for the upcoming 1.5.2 release. However its not all bug fixes. One very exciting new feature is the addition of GeoRSS as an output format.

The addition of GeoRSS makes the process of creating your own map mashup with GeoServer as simple as ever. Simply point Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, or Microsoft Virtual Earth at a GeoServer GeoRSS overlay and observe as your data is visualized.

Here is a sample screen shot. More screen shots and information are available here.

Just a quick note, which I’m putting in the ‘Tips and Tricks’ category, since it’s a trick to get quick feedback from the GeoServer community.  For many years the core GeoServer developers were not good at maintaining a consistent presence on IRC, which is used heavily in many open source projects.  We’d run meetings there, of course, but would not usually be on unless there was a specific meeting.t

In the past few months we’ve been getting a lot better, and are starting to get a group of people who are generally present on IRC.  For more details on how to get on IRC see the IRC section of our docs.  It also has information on the weekly meeting, which everyone is welcome to take part in.  So please, come join us and let us know what you’re doing and wanting to do with GeoServer.

With the recent release of GeoServer-1.5.1, the GeoServer ArcSDE Extension has gained the ability to serve ArcSDE raster datasets, as well as the vector datasets it’s been serving so far.

Detailed instructions can be found on the GeoServer ArcSDE Plugin page, and if any crack coders out there want to see support for more ArcSDE raster formats (other than the 3/4-band unsigned byte format we currently support) then help us get coding!

If you’re itching to see an example in action, check out this map or this map.

Happy rasters!